Last month, Dr Alizeh Abbas spoke to the InterSurgeon team about her global surgery journey and the American Journal of Surgery Student and Resident Scholar Committee.
From Pakistan to Alabama
In October, InterSurgeon had the delight to speak with trainee member, Dr Alizeh Abbas. Dr. Abbas, a passionate trainee and advocate for access to quality surgical care for all. She is currently a general surgery resident at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in Alabama, USA, having moved from Pakistan where she was born and raised. Dr. Abbas’ journey is one of determination, compassion, and an unyielding commitment to making surgery accessible to all. Her story began in Pakistan, where summers spent volunteering sparked a lifelong dedication to helping underserved communities. In medical school, she discovered the powerful intersection between public health, global health, and surgery and saw firsthand how surgical care could transform lives. She has done tremendous work on understanding how social determinants of health impact access to quality surgical care and what can be done to improve this access.
She served in a leadership role in a student organisation and started to fundraise for patients who could not afford their surgery in the “out-of-pocket” payment system in Pakistan. She reflects; “a lot of healthcare in Pakistan is out of pocket so it’s very hard for people to be able to afford a lot of the surgical procedures. I started this campaign to collect funds for our patients who needed surgery and really saw the impact that some of the surgeries had on patients… and how that changed everything for them and their family, especially for the young patients.. Once they had surgery, hey could do what they wanted with their lives. They could go back to school or they could work.”
Once Dr. Abbas finished medical school, she started a research fellowship in children’s surgery; “A lot of my work was focused on global children’s surgery, but I was really interested in trying to improve access and trying to understand this concept of essential surgery that people talk about.” Through her work, she helped develop a precise definition for feasibility in the context of essential surgery for the first time. Her passion for improving access to surgical care and experience in global surgery have informed her work with rural communities in Alabama today. She is dedicated to improving access to quality colorectal surgical care in the US, particularly in Alabama and currently leads impactful projects focusing on colorectal cancer screening and care and patient engagement technologies.
The American Journal of Surgery Student and Resident Scholar Committee
Now Dr. Abbas is the chair of the Student and Resident Scholar Committee for the American Journal of surgery. The goal of the committee is to reach all medical students and trainees regardless of background, area of origin or medical school affiliation; “The idea behind the committee is to make surgery and academic surgery accessible for everybody. We see that there are disparities in access to opportunities for students and trainees.” The committee has3 main areas of focus to increase access to academic surgery; via mentorship and role models, skill-building sessions, and research support. She says; “We’re affiliated with the American Journal of Surgery so we try to provide opportunities where trainees and students can learn different skills, for example how to write, how to publish, how to peer review.”
They arrange regular virtual events and host webinar series, one of which was posted on InterSurgeon; “When we do the Rose and Thorns series, our hope is to have the speakers come and talk about their journey as role models so people can see if they did it, then I can do it too. We explore some of the setbacks the speakers had as a way to learn because not every journey is linear. That can be really encouraging for our audience to hear and see that.” Their next project, starting in December, will be a series of peer review training sessions on Zoom to encourage students and trainees to learn how to review manuscripts and get involved in peer review; “There’s no restriction for membership so everybody can attend. This is applicable to all students and residents and there are not a lot of workshops out there specifically designed for students and residents to do peer review. That’s the gap that we have identified.”
InterSurgeon
Closing remarks from Dr. Abbas focus on InterSurgeon as she also organized a global surgery journal club earlier this year; “I thought that [InterSurgeon] was a really great idea, because my hope with all of this work really is to try to benefit as many students, trainees, attending physicians and researchers with this information that we’re putting out there, free and accessible for everybody. But I think a lot of times what happens is people don’t know that these resources exist. So a platform like InterSurgeon, which is so well-respected, well-known, used by people all over the world, that really has the power to help get this to other people. I think there’s so much opportunity for a platform like InterSurgeon to be able to share these resources… I think it was really great that we were able to connect.”
For Dr Abbas’s profile click here
