At the beginning of October over 550 surgeons and nurses attended the 46th annual meeting of the ISPN which was held in Tel Aviv. At the meeting there was a Global Neurosurgery session which was very well attended and at which William Harkness presented the 6 month data for InterSurgeon. During these first six months we have received 1465 visitors to our website, had 190 members join us from 59 countries and made 52 matches.
The global neurosurgery session began with a presentation from Michael Dewan, one of the InterSurgeon board of trustees, who was the 2019 recipient of the Raimondi award for his excellent paper on bellwether procedures for paediatric neurosurgery. This was then followed by Dr Hugues Gandaho from Benin who gave a remarkable paper describing a mobile operating facility based in an army truck which achieved excellent results with low cost and many advantages for the patients and their families. Brandon Roque, another InterSurgeon member and colleague of Jim Johnston, then described their experience developing an epilepsy surgery team in Vietnam and the importance of team building and developing the long term partnerships advocated by InterSurgeon.
Andreas Leidinger then described the challenges and opportunities for global neurosurgery for East Africa from the experience that he and his colleagues from the NED Foundation (Neurosurgery, Education, Development) have had in Zanzibar. Once again, the success has been as a result of a long term collaborative programme over the last ten years and is clearly a sustainable solution.
To complete the global sessions we had two flash presentations from Patrick Kamalo from Malawi and Teddy Totimeh from Ghana, both of whom described their achievements in resource poor environments and the strategies employed to overcome them.
This session was followed by the Presidential address from Graham Fieggen, InterSurgeon trustee and the ISPN President for 2018, who outlined the progress being made in Sub Saharan Africa, mentioning InterSurgeon and giving asn upbeat and inspirational message for ongoing global collaboration.
One month after the Tel Aviv meeting I am very pleased to report that our monthly website visitors have increased to over 1600 and our membership swelled to 214 from 63 countries and another 24 matches have been made! Thank you everyone as the success of InterSurgeon is entirely driven by its membership.
