Closing The Gap On Surgical Care Through Remote Education

Closing The Gap On Surgical Care Through Remote Education

Despite the fact an estimated 266 million operations are performed globally every year, over 5 billion people don’t have access to surgery. Why? Because surgical care is typically considered too complex or too expensive. Remote education can be implemented in healthcare with the right tools and training. 

This is nothing new. Back in the 1980s, former-WHO Director-General, Dr Halfdan Mahler, stated that ‘the vast majority of the world’s population has no access whatsoever to skilled surgical care’.

This clearly has to change. And with COVID-19 accelerating many of these problems, more education is the answer. But how do you educate surgeons across the world if there are hard restrictions in place on attending surgeries?

Remote Education: Training The Global Workforce

With just over 2 million surgeons, obstetricians, and anesthetists globally – and more required over the next ten years to achieve the minimal surgical workforce – teaching hospitals around the world need more experts to impart their knowledge to the next generation.

To make this possible – to get the best professionals to participate, wherever they’re based – a solution that can facilitate remote surgery is needed: such as our Surgery Assistance smart glasses.

In this way, a surgeon who specializes in liver transplants based in one hospital could carry out surgery on a patient whilst wearing a pair of smart glasses – which are connected to high-performance, remotely operable cameras.

This would allow students and other assisting professionals to see firsthand how the surgery is performed; whether they’re in the next room or the other side of the world.

The smart glasses enable the students to see exactly what the surgeon is seeing – live – throughout the whole procedure. They’re built to withstand the intense, fast-paced environment of the Operating Room, allowing easy hands-free consultations, as well as surgical proctoring.

Access To The Right Surgeons

Given the shortage of trained surgeons in many poorer nations, surgical tasks are frequently performed by non-specialist physicians in low-resource settings. As a result, training ‘mid-level practitioners’ is increasingly supported.

Thanks to devices like our smart glasses, underskilled physicians can have access to top surgeons; and be directly guided through each process.

With remote education and training, not only will trainee physicians have a broader set of surgical knowledge, but they’ll also be instantly improving patient outcomes. They’ll also be bringing a wealth of experience and confidence to communities in need of vital skills and expertise: the kind that they wouldn’t be able to access otherwise.

All things considered, in a connected world, where technology is sufficiently sophisticated enough to make information and education accessible to all, a simple solution can make all the difference.

The real saving grace in situations like these is the years of training and experience leading surgeons have – and willingly impart, in order to improve the state of global healthcare. And you can’t put a price on that.

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