Garreth Wood delivers successful speech at COSECSA conference

COSECSA, a key KidsOR partner, invited KidsOR Co-Founder and Chair Garreth Wood to deliver a speech at their Annual Scientific Conference, which this year focused on Universal Health Coverage as well as on providing safe surgery in the advent of Covid-19. 

The recent introduction of tightened Covid-19 travel restrictions from the UK Government meant that Garreth was unable to travel to Zambia personally. However, despite delivering the speech virtually at the last minute, the presentation was met with great enthusiasm by all attendees.

Garreth successfully discussed how to strengthen healthcare systems in low- and middle-income countries, and how the current KidsOR model for building paediatric surgical capacity can be extrapolated to healthcare systems around the world. 

His message was clear: access to healthcare is a basic human right, and organisations globally need to work together to ensure that everyone has access to safe, affordable, and timely care.

Before the pandemic struck, I was a regular visitor to many countries across Africa to progress safe surgery for children, and so I was very much looking forward to delivering my speech at COSECSA Annual Conference and meeting many of our partners and colleagues. I hope to be able to visit soon.

Garreth Wood, Co-Founder of KidsOR

A long-standing partnership 

As one of the largest non-profit professional bodies in Africa focusing on fostering postgraduate education in surgery and surgical training, COSECSA has been a key African partner for KidsOR since 2018. 

As two organisations striving to strengthen fragile healthcare systems, COSECSA and KidsOR have worked together to develop PAPSEP, the first Pan-African collaborative e-learning platform, which was launched earlier in 2021 in association with the Institute of Global Surgery of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and The West African College of Surgeons (WACS). 

COSECSA has also been a key training partner in the KidsOR paediatric surgical training programme, which recently saw 10 surgical scholars graduating in Zambia. Plus, the KidsOR scholarship programme also welcomed 12 surgical residents which will undergo three to six years of paediatric training in Africa.

In partnership with Smile Train, we will also fund the training of forty paediatric surgeons in Africa. 

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