Message from the Directors

Message from Dr. Catherine Juillard: 

I first came to understand health inequity not in a classroom or a clinic, but on a dirt road in West Africa. I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal, standing helpless after a car crash, watching injured passengers wait for help that would never come. There was no ambulance. No emergency line to call. No system designed to catch people when they fall. At the time, I didn’t see it as a failure of public health. But now, as a trauma surgeon, I know that’s exactly what it was. Behind every delayed ambulance, every missed diagnosis, every empty operating room in a rural hospital, there’s a story of systems that failed to show up. 

At the Program for the Advancement of Surgical Equity (PASE), we exist to change that. We deal with the end stage of inequality, the moment someone is bleeding, broken and in need. But we also look upstream: What roads did they have to travel to get here? What choices were denied to them long before they needed surgery? We believe surgical care should not be a privilege of geography or wealth. It should be part of what every human can count on. We are here to build systems that don’t just save lives, but give people a real chance to live them fully.

Message from Dr. S Ariane Christie:

For a long time in medicine, we were taught to treat the body, its infections, its wounds, its broken bones and assume that was enough. But working in both the U.S. and in Cameroon has shown me that healing is far more complex. It doesn’t start in the operating room, and it doesn’t end there either. You can be the most skilled surgeon in the world, but if your patient can’t get to your hospital, if they fear the system that’s supposed to protect them, or if they live in a neighborhood that was never given a fair shot, your scalpel alone won’t save them. That’s why we built PASE. We bring together people from different disciplines; surgeons, public health leaders, data analysts, students and community voices, because no single lens is wide enough to capture the truth of what people face. And no single profession has all the answers. Together, we work to understand not just the symptoms, but the structures behind them. We work to expand access to care, to opportunity, to justice. Because if we want healthier outcomes, we have to build a healthier world. And that starts by asking the right questions and daring to change the answers.

About Us

Today, surgery is not a privilege. It is a fundamental part of medical care. And yet, more than 5 billion people lack access to basic surgical and emergency care. This is not just a statistic. Lives are being lost due to preventable causes — diseases that could be treated, injuries that could be managed. Injuries now claim more lives each year than HIV, malaria and tuberculosis combined.  A lack of infrastructure, scarcity of trained providers and uneven distribution of resources are all contributing factors around the world.

The Program for the Advancement of Surgical Equity (PASE) exists to help close these gaps. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed many weaknesses in healthcare systems, especially in disadvantaged communities. In the United States, millions still face daily barriers to healthcare. People with mental illness, people working but still struggling to make ends meet, and residents of underserved neighborhoods face obstacles in getting effective care, especially when it comes to surgery and trauma services.

Healthcare access means transportation, infrastructure and awareness. At PASE, we work across those foundations, locally and globally, to bring surgical care to everyone.

Since our founding in 2019, we’ve focused on three key strategies: research, to understand and measure the problem; education, to train the next generation of leaders; and advocacy, to make sure what we learn and build benefits those who need it most.

At PASE, we believe no one should die from lack of access to healthcare that exists where it’s too hard for them to get.