An international panel of global health experts will converge on the Royal Society of Medicine on Tuesday 28 April for the Society's flagship Global Surgery conference which will address the role of high income countries in delivering safe, affordable and equitable care worldwide. Speakers from the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, India and South Africa will lead discussions on the shape of global surgery beyond 2015, the potential for and controversies surrounding NGOs in the delivery of global surgery, and how to prepare the next generation of clinicians to engage with global surgery.
This is the 4th annual RSM conference on major challenges in the field of global health and is a centre piece of the Society's global health programme. There will be three areas of focus throughout the day: surgery, anaesthesia and obstetrics. The first session, challenges and opportunities for global surgery in the next 15 years, will be chaired by Martin Smith, of the Chris Hani Baragwanath Academic Hospital in Soweto, South Africa. Speakers will include Professor Russell Gruen of The Alfred and Monash University, Melbourne, Australia and Andy Leather, Director of the King's Centre for Global Health.
Richard Horton, Editor-in-Chief, The Lancet, will lead the second session on the impact high income countries can make on global surgery. Dr Nobhojit Roy, of the BARC Hospital (Govt of India), Mumbai, India, will discuss moving beyond the external aid models of partnership and John Meara, Harvard Medical School, will discuss improving surgical outcomes through research.
Professor Chris Lavy, University of Oxford and Chairman of CARE International UK, will address the role of NGOs and chair a series of 5-minute presentations by NGOs working in the field of global surgery.
The final session on preparing the next generation of clinicians for engaging in global surgery will be chaired by Karen Nugent, University of Southampton and speakers will include Lesley Regan, Professor of Obstetrics & Gynaecology at Imperial College London and Sarah Greenberg, Paul Farmer Global Surgery Research Fellow.
Clare Marx, President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England will give the closing address: 'The way forward for the UK's response to global surgery'. The conference will conclude with the screening by the RSM Global Health Film initiative of Open Heart, a film following eight Rwandan children who receive high-risk-open-heart surgery in Africa's only free-of-charge, state-of-the-art cardiac hospital, the Salam Center run by Emergency, an Italian NGO.
