A collective project by the Royal College of Surgeons, England with the London School of Economics in an attempt to define humanitarian surgery- “Humanitarian surgery is an area for study, research and practice that focuses on the co-ordinated provision of surgical care in conflict and post conflict zones, in areas of sudden onset disasters and when the local health system is overwhelmed.” RCS England started the HSI (Humanitarian Surgery Initiative).
There has been a call for collective action of what’s going on in Palestine, Myanmar and Israel. Resources are limited in a war zone, communities are displaced when terror strikes again and again, and society has reached a far cry for help. It can be challenging to provide primary care and manage critical chronic conditions that can give life or death results. HOSPEX is a hospital exercise and the HOSPEX Tabletop is an exercise driven stimulation, based in a classroom setting, helping to plan an effortless action to provide primary care where it’s needed the most and ensures that the medical professionals are prepared enough in their clinical roles. It uses a ‘play-board’ and ‘playing cards’ which is a layout of the field hospital, its staff, patient disease, and trauma casualty cases, and major incident scenarios. It’s patented by the US Army, Belgium and the UK, but it was never tested in a resource-strained country like Africa. According to RCS England, an effective and well-resourced humanitarian surgery comprises of 4 key objectives: 1. Establish and validate humanitarian surgery, 2. Expand research and build evidence, 3. Build accessible, egalitarian, sustainable communities of practice, 4. Enhance workforce education and access to resources. Touch Surgery™️ is an app developed by medical students for medical students, think of it as an online 3D textbook of the operations and the vital organs involved. It is a popular app of choice among the surgical community. Touch Surgery is accessible on desktop/mobile devices and provides an in-depth video playback of the operation performed. A wide variety of medical innovations that are integral in the field of humanitarian surgery such as cloud based data like Proximie, mobile training & simulation (mHealth), drones and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, 3D printing and additive manufacturing and blockchain technology. The four advanced AI building blocks are surgical workflow analysis, instrument detection and tracking, scene segmentation and reconstruction, and critical structure identification in the field of surgery. There are standardised video programming available for teaching surgery and these can improve on the surgical technique and skill. Frugal innovation can aid in an egalitarian patient care among marginally displaced groups.
There is a strong focus and demand for a sustainable capacity and need for local trauma surgeons and doctors in the war-zone even when organisations like UNICEF are not involved. Organisations committed by medical professionals to fill in to provide healthcare is what keeps humanitarian surgery up and running.
Source: Myanmar Doctors in UK-1st International Conference.
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