By: Nyima Sillah
The Gambia through Edwards Francis Small Teaching Hospital on Friday 26th May hosted the 1st Banjul International Surgical Scientific Conference and a Surgical Outreach, held at Atlantic Hotel, Banjul.
The conference was held under the theme: Development of Minimally Invasive Surgery in Resource Limited Settings.
Speaking to this medium in an interview, Dr. Ammar Al Jafari, Chief Medical Director EFSTH who doubled as the Chief Host of the conference, expressed delight saying it was his dream since 10 years ago when he first came to the Gambia, adding if other countries can host 2 to 3 conferences in a year “then why not the Gambia.”
With this conference, he said in the operations, presentations and all they aspire to carry out include students, and medical personnel, and all involved in the medical sector will be more enlightened to strengthen the healthcare system of the country.
“It is important to get international guest Doctors because they are well experienced and familiar with modern-day medicines such as those from the UK. And with their coming, Gambian Doctors can as well learn and upgrade themselves.
“There are no excuses In the health system of a country as the government cannot sit and wait on donors. Rather efforts must be made and for this reason, I as the host of the conference have plans for the post-conference in which all recommendations received will be effected accordingly.”
Dr. Abubacarr Jah, a Senior Consultant Urologist who is the Chairman of the Local Organizing Committee said the conference is something that all countries would like to host since the outcome, and benefits of such a conference cannot be measured, which makes it vital to host it in the Gambia.
“All the surgeons from abroad will talk about it, share the experience with other surgeons, and every year, hopefully, we are going to make it bigger as mentioned by some of the speakers, maybe The Gambia would become a hub for medical knowledge,” he hoped.
Further to that, he said, “We are expecting that at the end of the two-day program, there would be a massive knowledge shared between the local experts and the foreign experts. We will be able to share that knowledge with our younger colleague surgeons and the ones that are learning to become surgeons.”
Dr. Jah added that they have a great team that worked together to be able to organize the conference within a short time and they have come up with a very good program.
Furthermore, Abubacarr F Darboe, Head of Gambia Medical Student said the conference is a big step in the right direction, noting they are happy as medical students because they are term as the future of health care delivery in this country.
“This conference will expose us to lots of things that we want to bring to our country to the fact that the purpose of this conference is to expose us to different technics that people are using in the 21 century. We expect to come out of this conference inspired, to go into different areas of medicine that would involve, treating patients using the minimal inventive ways.
“We have a lot of students that want to become surgeons in the future, so we want to become surgeons that are actually compatible with modern-day medicine and well-motivated to explore different opportunities in health care, especially in surgery that would improve the standard of our health care services in the country,” he expressed.
