Delivery of surgical health care in the United States.

In the past, a surgeon's primary interest concerned the art and science of surgery. Socioeconomic issues affecting surgical practice were only of minor importance. Consequently, little of the overall research into the delivery system of surgical health care has been conducted by the surgeon. In addition, since many of these investigations are ultimately published in journals not read by the surgeon it has been difficult if not impossible for the active practitioner to be aware of current thoughts and changing concepts in surgical health-services research. In this report, I discuss the major articles that have begun to analyze issues in this growing and important discipline. It is hoped that such a review will stimulate surgeons to begun taking a more active role in the formulation and conduct of future work into surgical health care delivery.