May 2020 Newsletter
Hello and welcome to our latest newsletter.
In this update, we share our new webinar series, introduce you to our latest War Doctor Hero and keep you in the loop with David’s media appearances.
Thank you, as always, for your continued support and we hope you are keeping well at home.
Taking our Training Online
To do what we can for our surgeons, we have launched a fortnightly webinar series led by David Nott and our faculty. During these sessions, we invite medics from low-resource settings to present their surgical cases to each other and to our training faculty so that they can share experience and advice.
We’ve also launched a COVID-specific webinar series which aims to provide any information, support and advice that we can to surgeons, particularly around how to look after their own safety when operating on COVID-positive or unknown patients.
One surgeon who has benefitted from these webinars is Dr Lucien, who we trained on a UK course back in 2018. Lucien said: “With advice from David and others from across the world on this webinar, I hope we can improve protection for our surgical teams and continue to provide surgery for those that absolutely need it.”
We plan for these webinars to endure beyond this pandemic as an excellent way of supporting surgeons and keeping in touch with them.
Spotlight on Dr Binod
In this latest instalment of our #wardoctorheroes series, we’re proud to introduce Dr Binod from Nepal.
Binod serves the rural, mountainous district of Dolakha, the epicenter of the 2015 Nepal Earthquake.
His patients have to travel for hours along bumpy, winding roads to reach the hospital, where a lack of resources can often present another obstacle to surgical treatment.
In 2018, we were able to offer Binod a scholarship to attend our UK-based STAE course, where he learnt how to manage orthopaedic and vascular injuries in low-resource settings.
The day after Binod returned from the UK, a child came to his hospital with a broken leg after falling from a height. Her left femur was completely crushed.
Using the skills learnt on the STAE course, Binod was able to repair the blood vessels, externally fixate the bone, and perform a skin graft to save her leg.
David in the News
David recently penned an editorial in The Lancet, in which he discussed the urgent need to coordinate a global response to COVID-19 and protect the world’s most vulnerable populations.
David wrote that “in fragile settings, there is no massive infrastructure like the NHS. There are few ventilators – eg, South Sudan has four ventilators per 11 million people, Chad has three per 5 million people, and in northern Syria there is one ventilator for every 36,000 people.” In order to prevent this pandemic from ravaging war-torn countries and refugee communities, David argues that governments must unite to coordinate a world-wide response. You can read the full article here.
If you would like to hear more about his experience treating COVID-19 patients on the NHS ‘front-lines’, then you can also hear him speak to NPR’s Terry Gross in the US about the psychological similarities between this pandemic and operating in war zones. Click here to listen to the broadcast.
Missed out on David’s talks last year?
If you missed out on David’s speaking events or if you’re just in need of some inspiration during lockdown, then this might just be the stay home ticket you need. You can watch a snippet of his talk with BBC’s Sarah Montague here, or to watch the full video, click here.
