A Practical Approach to Understanding Global Surgery

Behind The Knife: The Surgery Podcast

Science, Health & Fitness, Medicine, Education

4.8 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 9 October 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this kickoff episode of the Behind the Knife Global Surgery Series, we dive into what global surgery really means—and why it matters to all of us. Five billion people lack access to safe, timely, and affordable surgical care. Our guest, Dr. Juan Carlos Puyana, shares powerful insights on redefining global surgery, building meaningful collaborations, and why surgeons in high-resource countries should care deeply about this work. If you want to broaden your vision of surgery, challenge assumptions, and hear stories that connect operating rooms from South Carolina to South Africa, this is an episode you won’t want to miss.

Hosts/Guest:

Mike M. Mallah, MD, FACS, FICS
Director of Global Surgery at Medical University of South Carolina
@MikeMMallahMD
@MUSCGlobalSurg
[email protected]

Juan Carlos Puyana, MD, FACS
O’Brian Chair of Global Surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons Ireland
@jcpuyanamd
@RCSI_GlobalSurg

Learning objectives:

Define global surgery and explain how its meaning has evolved to highlight disparities in access to safe, timely, and affordable surgical care worldwide.
Recognize the value of global surgery engagement for trainees and surgeons in high-resource settings, including broadening perspectives and fostering humility.
Identify principles of ethical collaboration in global surgery, using real-world examples of partnerships built on trust, mutual respect, and shared goals.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Behind the Night, the Surgery podcast, relevant and engaging content designed to help you dominate the day.
0:25.0	Thank you all for your continued listening of Behind the Knife.
0:30.2	While many long-term listeners of BTK have used our podcast and resources while in medical school,
0:34.3	we now provide resources tailored to medical student general surgery curriculum.
0:38.7	Over the past 10 years of BTK and in our day jobs, we have dialed in the specifics of what medical students need to dominate their surgery rotation. It contains about
0:43.3	everything you need to include review text, video, audio segments, pictures, reviewing over about
0:49.1	17 disciplines that you encounter during your time on service. Enjoy the series and dominate the day.
0:56.1	Welcome behind the knife listeners. My name is Mike Mala. I am really excited about this episode
1:00.8	in this series. I'm a trauma surgeon, acute care surgeon in Charleston, South Carolina. I run the
1:06.1	global surgery program here, along with some amazing co-faculty residents, students, and staff. I'm also a humanitarian
1:13.0	surgeon and global surgeon. I've traveled to about 60 countries have operated on five continents.
1:18.6	Most recently, an active war zone with the UN, WHO. This work is very, very exciting to me and is kind of just
1:25.0	in my bones. And so I'm really excited that here behind the
1:28.2	knife, we are doing a global surgery series. This is the first episode. We'll be doing about
1:34.3	five or six episodes, just talking about all things global surgery, as it is a hot topic. For this
1:39.5	first episode, I'm really excited, and I can't believe we landed my guest, Dr. Juan Carlos Puyana.
1:46.2	He is originally a Colombian and currently the O'Brien Chair of Global Surgery at RCSI, the Royal
1:53.0	College of Surgeons, Ireland.
1:55.0	He leads the Royal College of Surgeons, Ireland Institute of Global Surgery.
1:59.8	He's also the director of Global Health and
2:02.4	Surgery at University of Pittsburgh, where he's still on faculty. He is the past president of the
2:07.4	Pan American Trauma Society, a number of the National Academy of Sciences on Global Health.
	...

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