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Introduction from Dr. Massey Beveridge - Director, Office of International Surgery: It is with great pleasure that we introduce the new Surgery in Africa reading course. Many of you will be familiar with the Ptolemy project which is designed to provide surgeons in east Africa with free access to the full text medical literature and to assess how they use it. In operating Ptolemy over the last 4 years we have become mindful of the need to link African surgeons together in an electronic community where they can share ideas and resources for improving the care of their patients. Surgery in Africa is an experiment designed to provide an electronic platform for the exchange of ideas and information. Its success depends on your input and contributions. We are starting with a series of papers reviewing controversial topics from an African perspective. These papers will all have extensive bibliographies intended to lure the reader into studying the scientific background to the debate and each will have full-text links to all the papers cited. As well readers are encouraged to sign-up for the Surgery in Africa Forum (managed for the present through Yahoo groups because this appears the simplest forum management tool). We hope the papers presented will engage our readers to comment and add their expertise to the debate, for little in surgery is immutable and most of what we do is subject to discussion, change and improvement. We remain quite flexible as to the format of future papers and are actively soliciting contributions from our African colleagues. Journal club type reviews, original research and opinion papers are all welcome too. These should reflect the interests and practice of our readers and is equivalent to publication in a scientific journal. Papers published here will be archived permanently so will always be available to future readers and will be searchable through internet engines such as Google. My profound thanks to Dr. Brian Ostrow and Professor Pankaj Jani for their enthusiasm and dedication to this project and to Ms. Anne Sorvari our web-mistress and Ms. Logan O’Connor the Ptolemy Coordinator. With your support we hope Surgery in Africa will become a trusted and valuable resource for surgeons in Africa. Best regards, Massey Beveridge Introduction from Dr. Brian Ostrow & Prof. Pankaj Jani, Co-editors: Welcome to the website of Surgery in Africa. This website is a joint venture of the Office of International Surgery (OIS) at the University of Toronto, Canada and the College of Surgeons of East, Central and Southern Africa (COSECSA). The objective of Surgery in Africa is to provide a self-directed, online, journal-based course for surgical trainees who are undertaking the Fellowship of the College of Surgery (FCS). As such we will be guided by the FCS syllabus, but we aim at all times to make the material relevant to the African experience. The format will be that of Monthly Reviews, which will discuss topics of surgical interest, referenced with appropriate full-text books and articles made available online. We will try to adhere to the principles of evidenced-based medicine in our recommendations. Although the COSECSA trainees are our primary focus, we hope that these Reviews will appeal to all surgeons in the region and internationally, who are interested in International Surgery. By selecting controversial topics we expect to generate discussion and debate among our readers. We ask you to safeguard your usernames and passwords to this site and not provide them to anyone. If you feel there is a surgeon who would be interested in subscribing to these Reviews, please send their name and the reason why you feel he/she is a candidate with his/her email address to brian@bookshelf.ca or ptolemy.info@utoronto.ca. Surgery in Africa is an interactive website and we invite you to join the discussion forum hosted by Yahoo groups at the bottom of the website. We hope you will send your comments and opinions on the material presented and your suggestions for new Reviews in the future. The practice of surgery in Africa is a very difficult one on many fronts. Imre Loefler has described it as “surgery in an unstable environment.(1) First, the clinical problems are very challenging and derive in part from social problems like poverty, lack of development, violence and political instability. Secondly, as widely recognized, but sadly ignored, the medical infrastructure has been depleted in many countries from an already limited foundation. Drugs, instruments, supplies of even the most basic kind may be in very short supply. The African surgeon often must work in relative isolation, treating patients with clinical problems he/she has had limited experience with and for whom referral is often not feasible for a variety of reasons. At the same time, there has been an explosion of medical information, primarily in the developed world, much of it online and free (the Ptolemy Project is a excellent example), which has the potential to assist the African surgeon in day-to-day decision-making. While Surgery in Africa cannot solve the above problems, we hope to place the world of online medical information at the disposal of the African surgeon. Finally as co-editors for the Monthly Reviews, we would like to thank Dr. Massey Beveridge, Director of OIS, for his visionary initiative of extending the significance of the Ptolemy Project by creating this course and website; COSECSA, for their dedication in providing high quality surgeons to meet the needs of their communities, and especially, Anne Sorvari and Logan O’Connor of OIS for brilliant technical assistance. We hope you will find the material useful, thought provoking and relevant. Professor Pankaj Jani, Nairobi, Kenya
(1) Loefler I. Africa--surgery
in an unstable environment. ANZ J Surg 2004; 74(12): |
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