From Northumbria to Tanzania

Colin Dobbyne says of his experience in Tanzania: “Imagine a people shoring up a primitive healthcare service, patients waiting days to be seen, no ambulances, friends and neighbours collecting the injured and dead from road traffic accidents in their trucks, many operative procedures, and the standards of medical care on offer in the west being simply unavailable. The Northumbria Healthcare Trust has worked tirelessly with the KCMC’s A&E, burns unit, obstetrics, and eye clinics etc for nearly 20 years. We went there to specifically help the medics develop keyhole surgery, and the benefits are now well documented. My wobbly video link to Newcastle provided the reassuring hand on Dr Kondo’s shoulder until he was self-sufficient, and now the service is in full flight.”

Implementing the visual link that would allow the telementoring to take place was ‘a massive technical challenge’. To allow the operation to be broadcast in real time from Tanzania to Hexham, Colin Dobbyne had to develop a system that would work with the extremely limited bandwidth and unstable IT infrastructure available in the area at that time. He succeeded, despite having very limited resources.  At the allotted hour, the BBC captured the transmission as it hopped across the Masai Steps via overland cable from town to town until it reached Dar es Salem, where it was bounced off a satellite 22,000 miles high to Israel, then picked up by a fibre cable running under the entire length of the Mediterranean, up the Atlantic coast of Spain and Portugal, into the English Channel and North Sea, and finally along the Thames Estuary to London.

Colin Dobbyne is the founder of Cambridge-based medical product development consultancy, Big Blue Solutions. A former technical and commercial director, and then international executive director, OR1 Development, at Karl Storz, he also founded, and ran as managing director (from January 2005 to January 2011), OR Networks, the company which established the link-up between Hexham General Hospital and the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre (KCMC). OR Networks was acquired by Karl Storz Endoscopy UK in 2011. Colin Dobbyne added: “Due to significant economic and population growth, the African healthcare market is expected to experience unprecedented levels of growth. The Africa Healthcare Summit brings hundreds of distributors, healthcare providers, and government officials together from across Africa to discuss business and investment opportunities and meet world-leading technology providers.