Nigeria needs robotic surgery -Chowdhary
Dr Sujit Chowdhary, is a consultant paediatric urologist at Apollo Hospital, India. In this interview at the sidelines of the 14th Scientific Conference of Paediatric Surgeons in Abuja, he spoke on health care in Nigeria and India and robotic surgery among others. in US and UK. The paediatric surgeons in
How are you able to bring Nigeria can benefit from that down costs? by visiting our centres, seeing
A visitor from Nigeria our work, bringing some of us worked with us. Before he here to help them build such came to us, he stayed in the centres. US for a month. You can ask Laparoscopic surgeries him what his experience was. for children are still not Somebody from Nigeria goes very widespread in Nigeria. to train in the western world, How extensive are they as a he will not get the same programme? reception as he would get It is very well developed. In when he comes to us. the last two years, I have not
We were in the same opened any child’s abdomen. position where you are today It is well developed but it just a couple of years ago. We requires many hours of have made this journey to training, a lot of hard work. modernize our surgery from Skills acquisition takes time. getting out of the shackles Are there new conditions that militate against medical you have seen emerge among growth. children in India that could
We have it set up now be similar to Nigeria? that we have laparoscopic I don’t think there are new surgery and robotic surgery kinds of diseases, but there in children. Our newborn are new kinds of treatment. survival now is more than For example, transplanting 95%. We have a very strong the liver or kidney of a baby, transplant programme for approaching surgery by the liver and kidney for children. robotic approach.
In what ways are you partnering with Nigeria on healthcare? Nigeria is a developing country, India is also a developing country. We have a hospital in Delhi and we have been able to put in place all kinds of modern surgical approaches available anywhere in the world.
Citizens of the developing world in Africa, Asia, when they need healthcare, have to access it from the developed world at 10 times the cost we can deliver.
We are here to cooperate with Nigerian paediatric surgeons to partner with them, help them with capacity building and whenever there is opportunity to offer our surgical services in specialized area of paediatric surgery at a cost which is actually one-tenth of the cost
The biggest challenge about paediatric surgeries in developing countries is uplifting the survival of newborn surgeries, and that requires lift in surgical skills, surgical planning, neonatal intensive care. Our surgical programme for children is at par with Boston and London.
The developing world is a very large world extending from the whole of Africa to the whole of Asia, and there isn’t a centre of excellence where such standard has been achieved.
What makes surgery different?
It is a very exciting field. For example, if your kidney has got tumour, imagine yourself being cut open, imagine the surgeon going in doing a lot of collateral damage to other organs or trauma. Imagine yourself coming out of operation how much pain you’d have, imagine yourself sitting in hospital for 10, 12 days for the wound to heal, whereas with robotic surgery you do not need to undergo any open surgery at all.
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