Surgery and Healing in the Developing World - Dartmouth-Hitchcock

Training Surgeons in the Developing World
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Attending National and International Medical Conferences
Ideally, surgery residents should attend one or more medical conferences a year.
Although the limiting factor will usually be financial, Program Directors should do
everything they can to make it happen.
Attending regional and international conferences enables residents to network
with other physicians, gain experience in critiquing papers that are presented, present
their own papers, and learn from others. It also legitimizes well-conceived and organized
surgical programs and allows other physicians to take the measure of surgeons
in training. It may even encourage other surgeons to help in some way to improve a
training program and improve its standing in the medical community.
Conclusion
Some surgeons working in the developing world have concluded that the obstacles
to training adequate numbers of qualified surgeons for their countries are
insurmountable. As a result most have quietly trained nurses to operate. Others
have trained doctors to operate but have felt incapable of training them to their own
level of competence without help. Others have simply been the best surgeons possible
without training anybody. Because of an ongoing and increasingly severe shortage
of surgeons none of these choices have done much to make quality surgical care
more available or affordable to the average citizen in the developing world.
Despite the apathy or even antipathy of governments or of the surgical community
as a whole, we believe that in countries where there critical shortages remain a
surgeon working alone can and should reproduce himself. He is more likely to be
successful if he networks with other interested surgeons both within and beyond the
borders of his country of service and if he associates his effort with an international
surgical society dedicated to surgical education. The establishment of the Pan-African
College of Christian Surgeons is an example of surgeons working in hospitals throughout
the continent of Africa creating an association to develop surgical residencies in
existing hospitals. These efforts to increase and upgrade surgical education in the
developing world deserve the enthusiastic support of both private and government
surgeons and of national and international surgical societies.
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