The most well-known way in which surgeons have historically contributed to this field is by going on a ‘surgical mission’. However, this out-dated approach is just a drop in the bucket, as relatively few patients can be treated during a mission of just a few weeks. We focus on knowledge transfer and research with a long term vision. Our aim is to help local health workers improve their own surgical care for people in the area through providing surgical training opportunities in their own setting.

We develop and implement courses for medical doctors, interns, nurses, and other hospital staff. We provide both “on the job” and “off the job” training, providing them with practical skills they can immediately put to use, in addition to theoretical knowledge. We work closely with local staff to organise and facilitate the course, step-by-step making them the trainers in our “train the trainer” method.

We are helping to bring awareness to the area of global surgery in the Dutch educational system. One of the reasons that the field of global surgery is generally overlooked by surgeons, is they are simply unaware of it. If the goal is for 5 billion more people to have safe, affordable access to surgical care, we need all the help we can get. For this reason we take any chance we can get to educate young medical students on global surgery. We do this through lectures but also promote interaction between Dutch students and students we invite to join online from abroad, such as Tanzania or Sierra Leone. It is our hope that by making people familiar with each other’s worlds and struggles it will lead to more fruitful collaborations in the future. We need to make an impact on every level to solve a problem of 5 billion people.

In order to practice medicine, first you need to study it. Medical students around the world do not have equal access to training opportunities, materials, and methods, and we need to close that gap.

For this reason we are developing an online ebook, The Basics of Burn Care. It was developed using the most modern standards of burn care while taking into account limited resource settings. It will be free, easy to access and use, and available in multiple formats.

We continue to create interactive learning tools to assist doctors all over the world in improving their care.