This webinar discusses the unique experience of the first surgical resident in Belgium to complete a 12-month trauma training program overseas in a double south-to-north collaboration with Colombia and South-Africa. The webinar illustrates the learning possibilities offered by the Global South in surgery, global trauma, and medicine in general.
Dr. Isadora Frick de la Maza (Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium) and her fellow surgical mentors address the various benefits that Global Surgery training programs can have on personal and professional surgical development and how this innovative clinical experience may have a valuable didactic experience by deviating from a conventional “North to South Teach Paradigms.”
Moderator:
Prof. Juan Carlos Puyana, MD, FACS
Dr. Puyana is a trauma/acute care surgeon, a global health educator, a clinical investigator and an international mentor. He has recently been appointed as the O’Brien Chair of Global Surgery, where he is leading the Institute of Global Surgery (IGS) at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) University of Medicine and Health Sciences. The IGS is the premier Global Health Institute working on advancing capacity building in surgery and empowering local surgical societies to advance their educational curriculums in their effort to improve access to quality surgical care in Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond.
In 2017, Dr. Puyana was appointed to the Global Health Committee of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and, in such capacity, co-authored the publication “Global Health and the Future Role of the United States,” as a key contribution from the NAS on Global Health endeavors.
As a Global Health trauma surgeon, he has worked in underserved emergency rooms and low-resource public hospitals in numerous Latin American cities. Working through the Pan-American Trauma Society, he was instrumental in creating and sustaining fruitful academic exchanges among several countries in Latin America.
He has been the principal investigator (PI) of six NIH funded global health research and training grants on capacity building, medical informatics, blood transfusion systems and eHealth. He has established fruitful and reciprocal mentoring collaborations in clinical areas and research educational endeavors with several universities and trauma centers from Latin America and Kenya.
Panelists:
Isadora Frick de la Maza, MD
Dr. Frick de la Maza is a senior resident in General Surgery from the “Université Catholique de Louvain” (UCLouvain) in Brussels, Belgium, with a great interest in Trauma, Global Surgery, and the practice of medicine in resource-limited environments. She is doing her 5th year of surgical residency overseas in Colombia and South Africa at two experienced level-1 trauma centers based in Cali and Cape Town, respectively. This double international trauma training is the first ever completed during a surgical residency program in her country.
Kathryn Chu MD, MPH, FACS, FASCRS
Dr. Kathryn Chu is the inaugural director of the Centre of Global Surgery and a Professor of Global Surgery at Stellenbosch University (South Africa). She is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and a Fellow of the American Society of Colon and Rectal Surgeons. She received her undergraduate degree from Stanford University and completed her medical and general surgery residency at the University of California- San Francisco. She was a Fulbright scholar at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where she received a master’s degree in public health and Developing Countries. She has co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications and holds several international grants to improve access to quality surgical care in sub-Saharan Africa. Dr. Chu is a board member of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health and the Transformation and Innovation Committee for Médecins Sans Frontières.
