InterSurgeon Working Group summary – news from Geneva
On 23rd May, InterSurgeon hosted a working group at the G4 Alliance working groups day. We opened the group with an introduction. We have seen a month on month increase in web visitors to the platform coupled with an increase in total member numbers. We are also seeing an increase the total number of countries represented to 114, the latest is Namibia. We went through a breakdown of specialities represented by our members with the largest numbers being neurosurgery (526), general surgery (129) and students (138). Each speciality is growing and we are encouraging new organisation and clinician members to join every month with events being published to interest all members. We’ve recently done a pilot study of our member survey with our champions to start understanding how members use the InterSurgeon platform and what improvements they would like to see. Most of the champions have pre-existing global partnerships so they primarily use InterSurgeon to browse the news, resources and other member profiles.
Latest changes
We introduced our new partnership with burns care with our 3 new champions; Dr Cameron Gibson, Mr Michael Serghiou and Dr James Gallagher. We’ve also seen an increase in members since the new map on our homepage launched with a filter button for burns care, alongside clinicians and organisations. Next up, our new research intern Alexandra Jarram was introduced showing some of the projects she is working on including member interviews, newsletters, social media and news articles.
Browsing for members on the InterSurgeon site
There are two key ways to use the site to browse for members – the map view using the key Explore our interactive map to locate individuals and organizations. Use the map key to identify different markers representing them. Click on a marker to access information about the selected individual or organization. Or select a location you can see which members (clinician and organisation) are based there and if they have published any offers or requests.
Or you can navigate to your partner using our search function in both the organisation section and the clinician section. Within these searches you can toggle for specialties, scopes of work and countries. To personalise your search for clinician members , you have the added ability to select for specialty information, member details, experience and mentorship, affiliations and linked accounts and offers and requests.
For organisations, you can also opt to select by type, those that have published offers or requests and those who are G4 Alliance members.
Don’t forget, that in order to contact our members, you need to be logged in. That way other members can be assured that you are a validated member.
Organisation Profiles
One of the changes we made to the organisation profile page was after last year’s (2023) working group. Now Organisation members can add multiple locations such as permanent (HQ), secondary (places where the organisation works) or temporary (event venues). We have also made an improvement to the organisation events option that allows organisation events to be online or at a physical location – these are then shared on InterSurgeon’s social media and can even be the subject of a newsletter and news article. The past events will remain on the organisation profile page. Organisations can showcase all affiliated members and encourage members to register on InterSurgeon individually and InterSurgeon profiles can be added to their websites.
Offers and requests
Another function of the site is the ability to make offers (your potential contribution to your future partner) and requests (your desired contribution from your future partner) from your profile. Organisations and clinician members can both take advantage of this. Offers and request typically can be categorised by clinical assistance, education, research, training or surgical equipment. Then InterSurgeon identifies matching offers and requests and notifies both members of the match. We work with a matching algorithm that runs daily and is optimized for accuracy (like uber or tinder) which ensures the matches received are most relevant to that member. If you have posted a request on InterSurgeon, you will be notified via email that the matches you receive are the most relevant to you. If you have posted an offer, you will be alerted whenever another member creates a matching request..
How to guide
At InterSurgeon, we are in the process of completing a “how to” guide. This is will cover information like how to register as a clinician, student or organisation and how to create offers, requests and events. This should be used by prospective and current members to help guide them when using the site and includes some helpful hints to ensure our matching algorithm works at its best and creates the most suitable matches for members.
Help Lightning
Help Lightning is a free resource available to all members of InterSurgeon. It uses merged reality to blend two real-time video streams that allows members of the surgical team to collaborate remotely. It can be used as a tool for education, mentorship and instruction – as well as for intraoperative case management. It allows both surgical planning and real-time intraoperative advice without the need to travel thus making long term global surgical partnerships more sustainable and practical given the time and cost of travelling internationally. All you need to use Help Lightning is your smartphone and an internet connection, though it can also be used with tablets, desktop computers and smart surgical glasses.
Discussion points
At the end of the working group, members and prospective members gave us several suggestions to improve the site. The first was cycling around the scholarships and fellowships, we have been highlighting on our news page. Unfortunately, InterSurgeon is unable to directly fund memberships but we are always happy to promote organisation members who have fellowships and scholarships to fill, for example the recent articles on the Sanjiv Bhatia fellowship and the fellowships and scholarships offered by FIENS.
Finally, we are looking to expand our resources page to include guidance of global collaboration and it was also suggested that we may also include some resources about the ethics of global collaboration.
