I’m very excited and I was very happy for AORTIC to take up our idea of having a session examining an African surgical network. Since the Lancet Commission earlier this year, we’ve recognised the place of global surgery as a new wave, really, in public health and in surgery, recognising that there’s a lot of modifiable disease which can be intervened in with surgery and that means surgery and anaesthesia.

So what we’ve done is we’ve brought together some key people, we have one of the Lancet’s Commissioners, Professor Smith, a couple of people who have been instrumental in driving breast surgery forward, Beatrice Wiafe and Ben Anderson. And we’re putting everyone in a room and we’re discussing how we can develop cross-border and intracontinental networks in research and training. At the moment a lot of capacity building is based on relying on Europe or the United States to give us capacity and really nurture that but what we should be doing is also turning inward within the continent, sharing that capacity that has already been built, but also building new capacity in places that haven’t been reached.

In South Africa we have a great privilege of having a population which may be seen as lower middle income but access to some middle and high income services and interventions. So we believe that we can help as a hub where other doctors can come and train, they can see the disease that they recognise from their own communities but they can see interventions that they maybe don’t have the financial ability to afford at the moment but if they can train they can take it back to those places.