D. Vervoort1, X. Ma2 1Harvard School Of Medicine,Program In Global Surgery And Social Change,Brookline, MA, USA 2Université de Montréal,Montréal, QUÉBEC, Canada
Introduction: Five billion people worldwide lack access to safe surgery when needed, causing 17 million preventable deaths each year and responsible for one-third of the global burden of disease. Despite the increasing recognition as an indispensable part of healthcare, surgery remains perceived as a luxury, and difficulties of scaling up surgical care remain widespread. InciSioN – International Student Surgical Network – is the world’s leading trainee global surgery network comprising over 3,000 medical students, residents, and young doctors from over 70 countries. InciSioN provides a platform to foster the development of future generations of global surgeons, anaesthesiologists, and obstetricians around the world.
Methods: To strengthen, unify, and escalate InciSioN’s voices around the world, Training Global Surgery Advocates (TGSA), a standardized three-day advocacy workshop, was created. The 27-hour workshop is built on traditional didactic lectures, role-play exercises, and small working group activities, as well as advocacy and diplomacy training to provide participants with the needed knowledge and skills to effectively advocate for global surgery. During the pilot program, participants performed a baseline elevator pitch advocating for global surgery on day 1 and a prepared elevator pitch at the end of day 3 to formally assess progress. A questionnaire on the perceived familiarity, knowledge and motivation regarding the workshop and its topics was filled by participants before the beginning of the workshop and immediately after the workshop. Assessment was done using a 5-point Likert scale (strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree) for 18 components.
Results: 25 participants were selected from a pool of 52 applicants, of which 14 medical students from 14 different countries (7 high-income countries, 7 low- and middle-income countries) were able to attend the workshop in Quebec City, Canada. 11 students were unable to participate due to restrictions by visa issues (9 people) or personal reasons (2 people). An average net increase of 1.73 points across all 18 components was observed among participants. Participants lauded the mix of theory and practical exercises to integrate knowledge into practice, the diversity of participants, and the focus on soft skills for advocacy and diplomacy. During the post-assessment, all participants agreed or strongly agreed (average of 4.64 points) on their motivation to train other medical students in their respective countries to become global surgery advocates.
Conclusion: TGSA significantly improved participants’ knowledge and advocacy skills in the field of global surgery. This type of mixed didactic and hands-on workshop appears to be feasible, enjoyable for participants, and effective in improving medical students involvement in the emerging field of global surgery.