Global Health attends the Global Surgical Frontiers conference 2017
27 April 2017
Find out how the conference went below:
Global Surgical Frontiers Conference Report
Thomas Hampton ENT registrar
The 2017 Global Surgical Frontiers conference was a useful forum for interdisciplinary and inter-sector discussion and collaboration, with representatives of LMIC centres, UK surgical training groups and multinational NGOs.
ENT UK was represented for the first time and talked about the need for surgeons to acknowledge the morbidity and disability suffered due to hearing loss. This maps specifically to the recent Sustainable Development Goals and may prove to be useful for ENT surgeons to advocate and lobby for increased acknowledgement and funding towards global ENT disease burden and surgical provision.
Mr Aneel Bhangu representing the University of Birmingham and the GlobalSurg research collaborative outlined the opportunity for placements and research within general surgery.
Fellowships and academic or PhD placements catered to those interested in Global surgery and it may be that this format could be mirrored or adopted by ENT UK.
In addition, multi-country, multicentre, multi collaborator largescale research groups have been comparing surgical outcomes from basic surgical abdominal procedures conducted in several high and lower middle income countries.
The clear mandate for this stems from the 2015 WHO assembly which implored member states to start collecting and compiling data on number, type and perioperative mortality and infection rates of operations in respective countries.
ENT has both thyroidectomy and tracheostomy which are regularly conducted in resource poor environments as neither operation requires significant specialist equipment.
There is an existing global tracheostomy foundation and NCEPOD document for tracheostomy but these focus on higher income settings.
Perhaps ENT UK could lead by example by suggesting multi site collaborative data recording is adopted for tracheostomy care.
Representatives from Kenya described rural settings where there may be an expectation to perform emergency airway procedures but the facility to perform and maintain a tracheostomy was not available.
From an experiential mind set, our paediatric surgery and Anaesthetic colleagues described well worn college-led guidance documents which allow up to 6 months of validated in-training placement in lower middle income global surgery settings, with prior agreed outcomes and objectives and guidelines for supervision. This may be a model which ENT UK can also look to adopt in the next few years.
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