Designing a surgical training model to develop skills to help drill bone and to place fixation pins to stabilize fractures
Team Lead: Dr. Moses Muhumuza Fisha
Lead Institution: CoRSU Rehabilitation Hospital
Team Countries: Uganda, United States, Jordan, Canada
Team ETALO (Education To Advance Limb-Saving Options for Open Fractures and Osteomyelitis) is designing a surgical training model for general surgeons, medical officers and other non-orthopedic practitioners to develop their skills to help drill bone and to place fixation pins to stabilize fractures. The Discovery Award will allow the team to develop a simulator designed to teach psychomotor skills for these procedures.
The team that makes up ETALO, which in the local Ugandan dialect means “a bizarre bone infection,” is also an acronym for Education To Advance Life-saving Options for Chronic Osteomyelitis and Open Fractures. The team is addressing a common cause of disability in low- and middle-income countries. They are developing a model to teach non-orthopaedic practitioners how to treat osteomyelitis, infections that are a result of bone fractures. The model will teach practitioners how to drill into bone and place external fixation pins.
“In our rehabilitation hospital in Uganda we see over 600 pediatric patients a year with chronic osteomyelitis and open fractures,” says team lead Dr Moses Fisha Muhumuza, head of orthopaedic surgery at CoRSU Hospital in Uganda. “This is just one hospital in Uganda. Throughout the world, hundreds of thousands of patients do not have access to trained specialists to treat these conditions.”
These conditions require early intervention to remove infected or diseased tissue and stabilize bone to avoid complications that would result in poor limb function, the need for multiple expensive surgeries, and possibly amputation.
Uganda, with a population of over 43 million, has only 70 orthopaedic surgeons. With over 80 percent of the population living in village or rural settings, these conditions are frequently managed in district or regional hospitals where there are only general practitioners or general surgeons who do not have orthopaedic training and are therefore not familiar with the basic skills necessary to treat these conditions.
They believe that the conditions in Uganda reflect what is happening in other LMICs and so the aim is to develop a model that will be used in Uganda and can be replicated by physicians and students around the world.
The surgical model they are developing will teach medical students, medical officers, general surgeons and other non orthopedic practitioners the psychomotor skills of drilling bone and placing half pins. They are also creating an animated simulator. All these will be encompassed with a self assessment tool.
“We intend for our model to be affordable and reproducible for all those practicing in low and middle income countries” adds Dr Fisha. “Our ultimate goal is to reduce the disabilities caused by chronic osteomyelitis and open fractures in both children and adults, which can result from poor patient management due to a lack of adequate surgical training and exposure.”
