Evaluation Partners Selected

The Global Surgical Training Challenge is in the process of contracting with evaluation partners that will be evaluating the finalist modules. Among the potential partners are medical colleges, universities, teaching hospitals, as well as health consortia. They represent settings in India, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Rwanda.

Because each of the Finalists’ modules addresses a unique clinical need, the evaluation partners must develop specific evaluation parameters to measure the usability and reproducibility of the module, the applicability of the skills, and, ultimately, the clinical impact in the community they serve. This can include varying the environments where the modules are tested — from training hospitals to rural health clinics — and the medical training of the learners.

Learners will be selected based on the surgical specialty and the intended skill level of the target learners for each module. Generally speaking, most learners will be first and second year surgical students and residents. Medical officers and clinicians who are not trained in orthopaedic surgery will be evaluating the Tibial Fracture Fixation modules. Modules will be tested in the countries in which they were developed, as well as other countries.

A common concern that has arisen in discussions with the evaluation partners is how to ensure that learners are trained well enough to perform the surgeries or procedures in patients. During the evaluation period, experienced surgeons and faculty members will independently assess the learners and closely supervise performance of the procedures on patients.

Evaluations will occur through August. 

 

GSTC Featured at MIT Solve Event

Intuitive Foundation’s President Dr Catherine Mohr and GSTC finalist Dr Sabrina Asturias spoke last month at Solve MIT 2022, held in May as a hybrid event. Dr Asturias shared her experience as the Chief of Trauma and Emergency Surgery at Roosevelt Hospital.

Dr Mohr set the stage by challenging the traditional surgical training model of “see one, do one, teach one.” She asserted that this model is not scalable to meet the significant lack of access to surgical care in low and middle income countries. Dr Mohr said that the primary question of the Global Surgical Training Challenge is “Can we create modules that will allow a clinician to self learn?”.

Dr Asturias, the lead innovator for the CrashSavers team, described the need for improved training among first responders and firefighters to manage bleeding in trauma patients. “A victim of a car accident in Guatemala faces a three-fold higher risk of death than someone in a similar accident in the United States,” she said. The lack of an organised pre-hospital trauma system and the lack of training among both professional and volunteer responders contribute to this disparity.

Learn how Dr Asturias and her CrashSavers team are attempting to address this need. See her conversation with Dr Mohr here. 

 

RCSI Hosts Meeting Focused on Patient-Centered Global Surgery

The Institute of Global Surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland hosted a hybrid meeting in March that addressed a variety of issues related to patient-centered global surgery. Over 100 people came together in-person in Ireland, and several hundred joined online for the virtual portion of the meeting.

On the first day, at the in-person meeting, ​​His Excellency Dr Mpoki Ulisubisya, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Health of Tanzania, delivered the keynote address. The online meeting included the presentation of several abstracts, as well as keynote addresses by Dr Hisham Abdullah, Director-General of Health, Malaysia; Dr C. Alessandra Colainanni, Assistant Professor, Oregon Health and Science University; and Agnes Binagwaho, Vice-Chancellor, University of Global Health Equity, Rwanda.

You can see the presentations here.

 

New Global Surgery Expert Joins the Judging Panel

Dr Peter Weinstock, an associate professor of anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School, is joining the prestigious Global Surgical Training Challenge judging panel. Dr Weinstock is the Director of the Simulator Program in paediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital. He has several published peer-reviewed papers on simulation training.

 

Global Surgery News

The Global Surgery Foundation has published a report titled ‘Towards a Strategy for Improving Surgical Healthcare Worldwide.’ The consensus paper “outlines a renewed global surgery strategy to expand surgical healthcare in LMICs, given recent trends, research and empiricism in surgical healthcare and global health systems.”

The World Federation of Societies of Anaesthesiologists held a session at the World Health Assembly where they released a new documentary about training clinicians about safe obstetric care, including C-sections. See the movie preview here.

The British Medical Journal (BMJ) published an editorial titled ‘Voices beyond the Operating Room: centring global surgery advocacy at the grassroots’ in their May issue. The authors claim that surgery, including obstetrics and anaesthesia, is becoming more central in discussions about global health equity.