Welcome to the Global Surgical Training Challenge newsletter where we share updates about the Challenge and news from the global surgery community.
Watch the Grand Prize Winner announcement here.
GSTC Announces Grand Prize Winner and Runner-Up
From an original cohort of 42 international teams, we announced the $700,000 Grand Prize award. Team ALL-SAFE, based in Ethiopia with members in Cameroon, Kenya, and the United States, building surgical self-training modules for laparoscopic skills, was selected as the winner. Team Tibial Fracture Fixation (TFF), based in Nigeria, won the runner-up award, winning $300,000 to continue their work building modules using 3D printing to teach essential fracture management.
Grand Prize Winner Grew from a "Small Group of Rebels" to a Team of 30 People in Multiple Countries
ALL-SAFE’s three-prong approach to their training modules — open-source modules with didactic, cognitive and built-in self-assessment elements — lends itself well to training beyond laparoscopy surgery skills.
Runner-Up Team Leads for Tibial Fracture Fixation Training See a “Game-changer”
The team co-leads for Tibial Fracture Fixation set out to develop a module that teaches medical officers and non-orthopedic surgeons the essential surgical skills needed to treat tibial fractures, one of the most common orthopedic injuries in the world. These skills can be used to prevent needless suffering from disability and even death for the estimated 133 million patients who sustain extremity and pelvic fractures globally every year.
SELF: The Surgical Education Learners Forum, which was introduced at COSECSA’s annual scientific conference in December, evolved from the Global Surgical Training Challenge (GSTC). It enables the development and evaluation of training modules for health care workers in low-resource settings. SELF training enables anyone to independently learn and self-assess specific skills. SELF training modules are free-to-use and publicly available.
With the announcement of the Grand Prize and Runner-Up this week, we wish to take this moment to give our thanks to the hundreds of people around the world that made this possible. Starting a global surgical training challenge in the middle of a global pandemic was quite a feat. The cooperation, support, and innovation of our partners made it all possible.
Our Evaluation Partners made a huge contribution of time and effort to provide essential feedback to us and the teams:
Maulana Azad Medical Centre (New Delhi, India)
Alzaiem Alazhari University (Khartoum, Sudan)
King Faisal Hospital (Kigali, Rwanda)
Yekatit 12 Hospital (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia)
Finally, we want to give a special thank you to all the teams who answered the call to challenge the status quo of global surgical training. Your innovation and creativity have been an inspiration. A special thanks to our other finalists:
