Second WSES convention, WJES impact factor, and emergency surgery worldwide

Background In 2007, before founding the World Society of Emergency Surgery (WSES), we developed a questionnaire to investigate how emergency surgery was organized and implemented as a practice throughout the world. We discovered two fundamental models, which were sometimes present simultaneously in the same country [1]. One model was characterized by hospitals with designated emergency surgery departments and the other featured hospitals without an emergency surgery department in which surgical emergencies were subdivided among various general and specialized surgeons. Similarly, some hospitals had designated trauma teams while others had no such designated units. However, despite the heterogeneous complexity of emergency surgery in a worldwide context, the work of surgeons around the globe appears remarkably similar regardless of the name attributed to the facility in which they practice, be it emergency surgery, acute care surgery, or another generic title. Although it is difficult to succinctly define emergency surgery, which includes a broad spectrum of procedures, a universal definition could be poly-specialized surgery performed for traumatic and non-traumatic acute diseases. We have considered non traumatic emergency surgery as non CNS life-threatening diseases requiring urgent operative intervention (within 24 hr) with the exception of those requiring total cardiac bypass. There is a significant difference between traumatic and non-traumatic acute diseases. The dispersion of trauma programs sponsored by the American College of Surgeons has resulted in the near-uniform management of trauma patients around the world. By contrast, the management of patients with non-traumatic acute diseases (intra-abdominal infections, bowel occlusion, etc.) remains poorly standardized and varies dramatically between treatment centers. Standards for the management