Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust’s ‘ground-breaking’, web-based audio-visual link with Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre (KCMC) (HEJ – January and May 2011) has won the British Medical Journal (BMJ) 2014 Karen Woo Surgical Team Award – 15 years after the link was set up.
Initially, laparoscopic surgery at KCMC could only be undertaken when the surgical team from Northumbria visited the hospital in Moshi. A video link seemed the ideal solution, and the surgical team approached engineering consultant, Colin Dobbyne, to make it work. However, the Tanzanian communications infrastructure was not sophisticated enough to enable high speed video transmission. With the easiest option – installing a satellite link – prohibitively expensive, the only affordable option was to use the local internet connection, which, at the time, ‘had less bandwidth for the entire town than most people have in their houses in the UK’. Colin Dobbyne thus developed a robust, low bandwidth video transmission system, enabling transmission of the best video images the infrastructure could support.
The telementoring link has enabled Liam Horgan, consultant surgeon at Northumbria Healthcare, and his surgical team, to teach laparoscopic surgical techniques via a dedicated IT link to their KCMC colleagues 5,000 miles away, who serve a population of around 13 million in northern Tanzania.
Thanks to this training, where surgeons can see each other, and the African team be mentored as operations take place, Tanzanian surgeons felt sufficiently confident to perform laparoscopic operations on their own after the initial two years’ training.
Consequently, between 2005 and 2013 over 500 such procedures were completed, substantially reducing overcrowding on surgical wards, and patient stay lengths in hospital. The same technology has established a link between the KCMC operating theatre and the adjoining college, enabling surgeons to train their own students in laparoscopic techniques.
