Uganda has made tremendous surgical advances with innovations that focus on minimal invasive techniques, new technologies and instruments but the clients – many Ugandans are still seeking surgical procedures abroad.
This is on the backdrop of a big surgical burden, 40 percent surgical diseases, with number of surgeons still low compared to the population. Uganda has only 350 surgeons serving a population of about 45 million people.
To create awareness about these, Members of the Association of Surgeons of Uganda will carry out the proceduers together with colleagues from Anaesthesia, Nursing and Laboratory for Ugandans at their annual scientific conference and Annual General Meeting.
The event is hosted on a rotational basis across different regions in Uganda, and this year it’s happening in the Lango sub-region.
The event’s schedule runs from September 10th to 15th, indicates that it will last for six days. This extended period suggests a comprehensive approach, potentially including a variety of medical services such as general check-ups, consultations, diagnostics, vaccinations, and more.
The involvement of healthcare professionals, potentially from different specialties, is likely to ensure that a range of medical needs can be addressed.
Furthermore, the symposium for surgery residents scheduled for September 16th indicates that there will be a professional development component to the event.
Adiitionally, the health care services will be provided for free to all attendees though everyone will be assessed for elibilty
The conference theme is ‘the role of surgery in economic development’. The annual conference will also be in remembrance of the greatest surgeon Uganda has ever had, the late Prof. Sebastian Kyalwazi, former head of the surgery department at Makerere University Medical School, Mulago. Prof Kyalwazi is described as the ‘father of surgery in Uganda’ and performed near to miraculous surgeries that were ground breaking. He died in 1992.
At the conference the surgeons under their umbrella organization, the Association of Surgeons of Uganda (ASOU) will create said awareness of not just what procedures can be done by experts in Uganda but also what illnesses require a surgical intervention. This they believe will reduce the persistent medical tourism by Ugandans.
Dr. Victor Kigonya, a Resident Surgeon at Kibuli Muslim hospital, said that he has interacted with many patients who present medical documents of procedures done abroad, costing them more than what they should have spent in the country. Yet these procedures can easily be done in the country at an affordable fee.
“We shall be carrying out mainly minor operations and a few major ones which donot require special attention after surgery,” Kigonya also the spokesperson of Association said.
Kigonya said if the population knows about the procedures available and make the right choice early and do they (surgeons) do the right thing any lives will be saved and money.
He cautioned that awareness problem doesn’t stop at tertiary procedures that need advanced care but even with smaller problems such as hernias, through surgical camps, they have found people living with easily solved problems such as swellings and hernias for ten to twenty years.
According to Dr. John Ssekabira, who heads the pediatric surgery unit at Mulago National Referral Hospital, this challenge is even worse when it comes to surgical problems among children as there are fewer than ten pediatric surgeons in a country of 45 million people.
Each week in Mulago hospital alone, Ssekabira says they operate on twenty and thirty children with various complications but many surgeries such as hernias are not urgently attended to as required because of the huge need for other life-threatening surgeries.
He says 10% of newborn babies in Uganda each year are born with a condition that requires surgery for a child to fully realize their potential but because some don’t access such care they are condemned to live with abnormalities that can be quickly corrected without having to ferry them abroad.
Without such surgeries being done in a timely manner, experts worry that many Ugandans continue falling prey to unscrupulous herbalists who advertise themselves claiming to be able to cure certain surgical conditions without surgeries.
Funding is from Subscription money and support from government entities like Ministry of Health , Lango Parliamentary Group , City Oil, NMS,UWA, UMEME, Bulamu Health Care and many more inlcusion various drug companies in the country.