6. Thank you for reading, and a massive thanks to Mike Bath, Tom Bashford, and the rest of the team, for their support with this paper.

5. This scoping review serves as a 'call to action' paper, identifying:

a) the need for higher quality research in LMICs assessing need for and access to trauma services
b) the need to increase the provision of trauma services

4. With that caveat, the median rate of trauma in the community we identified from our studies was 7361 individuals per 100,000 per year (IQR 6313–9461).

Unsurprisingly, this suggests underprovision of trauma surgery services in LMICs.

3. We need higher quality data that assesses the rate of traumatic injuries in the community prospectively. Most of the studies we looked at were retrospective and relied on household surveys. If we are to better understand the gap between need and access, this must be a research priority.

2. From the data we were able to gather in the literature above the single centre level, the calculated median rate of trauma surgery (per 100,000 per year) is 20x less than the Lancet Commission on Global Surgery's Benchmark Country (New Zealand).

This is a massive gap!

1. There are very few prospective studies that look at either need for or access to trauma surgery above the single centre level. This means that much of the literature is dominated by studies from academic centres, which are not representative of most healthcare facilities in LMICs.