Month: May 2015

There’s a popular saying, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

When Shilpa Murthy, MD, MPH, and John Scott, MD, MPH, were approached about giving a lecture to medical students about research methods as part of their global health work in Rwanda, they knew they needed to push for something longer-lasting; they needed to teach and not just give. “We knew that for change to be sustainable, it would have to come from within,” explained Murthy, a general surgery resident and research trainee at the Center for Surgery and Public Health (CSPH) at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH).

Read the full story here in BWH Clinical & Research News.

Over the course of the last five years, Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital orthopedic  surgeon Dr. George Dyer has traveled to Haiti 14 times. His commitment to the country began immediately following the 2010 earthquake when he signed up to travel there with Partners in Health. His mission then and now has been to help train skilled orthopedic surgeons.

Reflecting on his first trip to Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake Dr. Dyer says, “It was very rewarding. We did a lot of good. But as the two weeks that I was there wore on it, it was clear that the earthquake was really only a Purchase Windows 7 Download Online small blip in the number of orthopedic injuries that overwhelm the local capacity of surgeons in Haiti.” At the time there were just 40 orthopedic surgeons in a country of 12 million.

With the support of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons and their generous grant, Dr. Dyer and his colleagues have worked tirelessly to foster an interest in orthopedics in young Haitians and help them get the training they need to practice their profession. They organize orthopedic training for residents and also fully trained orthopedists in Haiti.  They bring visitors to Haiti to teach local physicians on the ground. They organize an annual conference. And they bring their Haitian colleagues out of the country to go to the US or elsewhere for training courses and to see techniques that are not taught anywhere in Haiti. Continue reading “Making Good on a Promise Made to the People of Haiti” →