Final Honour School
2020/21
Current student: Alexandra Knighton
College: Balliol College
Supervisors: Dr Roba Khundkar and Professor Michael Dunn
Project title: Surgical Missions: Origins, Ethics, Perspectives
"I'm looking at the history of global surgery as well as current perspectives to discuss the ethics of surgical missions. Much of the unmet surgical care is shouldered by Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), whilst interventions are often provided by High Income Countries (HICs). I'm researching interventions in the form of surgical missions, where a team of surgeons from one country provide care in another. Whilst the intentions of these interventions are almost always good, the ethics and the impact can be questioned: often they are not economically effective, can disrupt the normal surgical activity, and can be exploitative, such as when used for training of the HIC workforce or voluntourism. I'm looking at how the history of global surgery ties in with the ethics and perspectives on modern day surgical missions."
2019/20
Current student: Harry Jackson-Smith
College: Hertford College
Supervisor: Dr Roba Khundkar
Project title: Mortality and morbidity of paediatric soft tissue sarcoma in east central and southern Africa: a systematic review
"In September 2019 I completed the oxford global surgery course run by Roba and OUGSG. After that I started up on my dissertation titled above. I set about churning through all the literature, writing up my protocol and collecting as much data as I could. The initial plan was to head to tanzania in November, however due to the Ebola outbreak the trip was postponed. I was going to perform a retrospective review whilst I was out there as part of my project. Having arrived in dar es Salam amidst the beginning of another pandemic I started the best week of my degree.
My role was student lead and with the help of Roba, medical students from muhimbili, in particular victor, and the SSM students back in oxford we set up a student collaboration between the two medical schools. Since then I have been working on and off with victor, a 5th year medical student at muhimbili, and we're now aiming to apply for an afox grant towards a burns project. The aim is that he will get enough funding to come to oxford to do some work, this would be a welcome change/addition from the one way stream of high to low income exchanges we see and I hope he will have as enriching an experience as I did travelling to a hospital so different from what we are used to in the UK.
My dissertation is complete now, with the help of roba, my abstract was presented at the British sarcoma group conference. I'm now getting it ready for submission to publication."