There are no hand surgeons in the entire country of Uganda. During this trip, we will travel to Kirrudu Hospital to build hand surgery capacity. Kiruddu Hospital, located in Kampala, Uganda, is the national referral center for burns and plastic surgery. It is a teaching hospital, home to the COSECSA plastic surgery fellowship training program and a training hub for the region. The trip will focus on teaching these fellows hand surgery procedures that they would like to be proficient in. The teaching will include both a hands-on component (by operating together on hand surgery patients) and a didactic component (via lectures on the conditions that we will be treating and procedures that we will be performing). We will provide didactics before, during, and after the trip for more long-term and sustained teaching. The local team has already started recruiting patients for this "hand camp." The main goal will not be to perform as many procedures as possible, but instead to teach the fellows as much as possible such that they will be competent and safe in performing these procedures independently. Furthermore, in addition to hand surgeons, our team will also include anesthesiologists, hand therapists, and nurses, all of whom will not only deliver direct patient care but also fulfill teaching responsibilities to their counterparts at Kirrudu.
The most direct beneficiaries of our trip include the Ugandan patients we treat and the plastic surgery fellows we teach. There are many indirect beneficiaries however; because Kirridu is a training hub for the region, we expect that the fellows we teach will return to their home countries in East, Central, and Southern Africa. This is needed because of the dearth of hand surgeons in this region.
Because the primary goal is to teach the surgery fellows, anesthesiologists, nurses, and hand therapists, we expect our impact to be more long-lasting and sustainable than if we were to simply operate. The long-term nature of our partnership will further extend our impact. For example, the Kirrudu trainees are invited to our departmental grand rounds as well as our weekly resident didactics via Zoom. This ensures that our trip is not simply a one-time "parachute in" mission trip, but is a part of a long-term partnership with a strategic plan for building hand and reconstructive surgery capacity in Uganda and surrounding countries.
During this trip, we had the opportunity to work with, teach, and learn from the plastic surgery residents and fellows at Kiruddu Hospital in Kampala, Uganda. The focus of the week was hand surgery, so we delivered didactic lectures, indicated patients with hand pathology for surgery, and performed surgeries with the goal of not only treating patients but also teaching hand surgery. Our goal was maximizing education rather than maximizing case volume. Through this trip, we were able to deliver high quality hand surgical care as well as impart knowledge about hand surgery such that the trainees are closer to being able to perform these surgeries independently. Additionally, because it was a multidisciplinary trip, our team included anesthesia, hand/occupational therapy, and nurses--all of whom functioned as providers as well as educators.
