Safer Surgery and Anesthesia, Every Time, Everywhere
The Lifebox Strategic Plan 2025-2030 – Safer Surgery and Anesthesia, Every Time,Everywhere – follows thepatient journey through the entire surgical process, seeking to improve safety and quality of care every step of the way. By strengthening critical aspects of surgical systems, we aim to improve surgical and anesthesia safety for over 4 million patients by 2030, with a special focus on women and children.
We will strengthen surgical systems across the entire patient journey by building leadership, teamwork, and quality improvement capacity among healthcare professionals. By scaling proven programs in anesthesia safety, infection prevention, and perioperative teamwork, Lifebox will drive measurable, system-wide improvements in surgical care.
Strengthen surgical systems and improve outcomes for 4 million surgical patients through evidence-based patient safety and quality interventions across 200 facilities in 20 countries by 2030.
4 million
Surgical Patients Impacted
200
Healthcare Facilties
20
Countries
Our Approach: Safer Surgical Systems Strengthening (S4)
The Safer Surgical Systems Strengthening (S4) framework is Lifebox’s integrated approach to strengthening surgical and anesthesia systems in low- and middle-income countries. It brings together Lifebox’s proven toolkit of evidence-based interventions into a single, coordinated framework — improving safety and quality of care across the entire perioperative pathway, before, during, and after surgery.
Grounded in co-creation with local partners, S4 supports hospitals and health systems to identify their greatest patient safety challenges, implement evidence-based solutions, embed sustainable improvements, and scale successful models across national health systems.
Our Safer Surgical Systems Strengthening (S4) guiding principles
Our Safer Surgical Systems Strengthening (S4) framework is guided by five core principles
Systems strengthening, not vertical programmes: We invest in the underlying capacity of a health system, not in isolated, one-off interventions that fade once funding ends.
Local leadership and country ownership: Solutions are designed and driven by the health workers and institutions who will sustain them, not imposed from outside.
Sustainable scale through peer learning and health system integration: Improvements spread hospital to hospital and region to region by embedding into existing systems, not by parallel infrastructure.
Data-driven quality improvement: Every intervention is measured, and what the evidence shows works is what gets scaled.
Long-term institutional partnerships: We commit to ministries of health and hospital systems over years, not single grant cycles, because system change takes time.
“It is critical that we close the gap for the 5 billion people who don’t have access to safe surgery. The magic of Lifebox is that we are creating a movement, making safer surgery possible for patients everywhere and creating a better system as a whole.”
Dr. Atul Gawande, Lifebox Co-founder
Key Programmatic Objectives:
Surgical infection prevention and safety processes strengthened in partner facilities, resulting in a 40% reduction in perioperative mortality
10,000 professionals providing safer patient monitoring with pulse oximetry and/or capnography in operating room and recovery areas in partner facilities, resulting in 50-70% reduction in preventable anesthesia complications
Evidence of improved perioperative teamwork at 400 partner facilities with. a special emphasis on women’s and pediatric surgery
A strengthened global evidence base on surgical and anesthesia safety established through data-driven research and program evaluation, resulting in robust, locally generated evidence supporting the global scale-up of Lifebox surgical safety interventions.
Surgical and anesthesia safety advanced through a structured innovation pipeline, guided by local insight and targeted investment, resulting in the development and scale-up of context-appropriate technologies and devices that address critical gaps in safe surgical and anesthesia care
Reaching 4 million patients across 200 facilities in 20 countries by 2030 depends on partners who invest in surgical systems for the long term. Join us in scaling S4 and making safer surgery and anesthesia a reality — every time, everywhere.
