DPhil project title

Assessing the Impact of Point-of-Care-Ultrasound on Paediatric Surgical Outcomes in a Low-to-Middle-Income Country.

SUPERVISORS

 Professor Kokila Lakhoo and Professor Ashok Handa

I am a Paediatric & Neonatal Surgery Registrar currently working towards a DPhil in Surgical Sciences. I graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a first-class honours degree in Medical Sciences before completing my MBChB at the same university. During my studies, I pursued my interest in surgery by undertaking an ex-clerkship at Harvard Medical School, where I worked at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in the area of Surgical Critical Care, Trauma & Burns Management. I completed my Foundation Training and Core Surgical Training in the Severn and Mersey Deaneries, respectively, before ranking 1^st in the National Selection process for Paediatric Surgery speciality training. Throughout my career, I have been motivated by and engaged in global health/surgery issues. I was awarded an internship at the World Health Organization (WHO) Headquarters, working on a policy to improve access to key interventions for Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health (RMNCH). In line with this, my current research is in the field of Global Surgery Implementation Science, aiming to improve outcomes for children with surgical disease in low-to-middle-income countries (LMICS).  

Our research focuses on providing an affordable, technology-based solution to help improve the quality of surgical care for children in LMICs. We aim to design, deliver and validate a training programme that equips surgical-care providers in Muhimbili National Hospital (MNH) Tanzania with competence in the use of point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) for the management of paediatric general surgical patients. As it stands, POCUS has been harnessed in many other medical disciplines within LMICs, as this cheap ‘handheld’ technology can provide ‘real time’ accurate diagnoses and circumvent the need for more costly or limited diagnostics resources. If successful, this project could provide a scalable and sustainable solution that revolutionises the way we assess, manage and treat paediatric patients with acute surgical pathology in the LMIC setting.