Sixteen students attended our workshop from around the world, with representatives from countries as diverse as Switzerland, Taiwan, Guatemala, South Africa, and Lebanon. While none of the students had had much experience with global surgery before, we had a fantastic and interactive discussion over the hour and a half session about the key issues in the area.
While the first part of the workshop focussed on an introduction to global surgery, highlighting some key statistics and myths about surgery and the role of surgery in global health, we also talked briefly about our aims with InciSioN as a group, particularly in relation to our plans for our Advocacy and Education sub-committees.
However, the real fun of the workshop was in the various role-play and team exercises that we had planned. These included an exercise looking at barriers to surgical care in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), by getting students to work through a case of a woman presenting with a vaginal fistula from an indigenous LMIC community, and a brainstorming session to look at solutions to global surgery issues with participants divided into groups representing High-Income Countries (HICs), LMICs, international organisations, and rural clinics.
Although the session unfortunately had to be relatively limited (an hour and a half was definitely not long enough, as the participants declared) we were really impressed by the passion and enthusiasm that all of the students brought as they participated. In the future, we hope to present more global surgery workshops in partnership with IFMSA NMOs, to allow us to educate even more students on the importance of global surgery in modern healthcare.
Our team would like to thank Dominique Vervoort for facilitating the workshop and Josephine de Costa for writing this entry.
