Dr. Catherine DeVries
speaker
80 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Dr. Catherine DeVries’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So it's true for all aspects of surgery, whether it's trauma care, whether it's urological care or anything else you plan to do. you do need to be aware of public health. And public health people almost never go into an OR.
So the book, getting back to your question, was an attempt to introduce surgery to the public health community as well as to introduce public health concepts to the surgical community.
Yeah.
Interestingly, you know, I wouldn't have guessed it, but the when we were first working in Honduras, there were opposing camps in San Pedro Sula in the journalism community. And not everybody was all that enthusiastic about Americans coming in, even though we were working very much with our Honduran colleagues. And there were newspapers that were
printing that the Americans were coming and experimenting on the little boys in Honduras. And then, so that was not every newspaper. There was the opposing newspaper, which printed a more favorable and accurate view of what we were doing. But there are, depending on where we're working, always going to be some factions that are either anti-American.
IVU, for example, is an international organization. Not everybody who volunteers and works is American. There are people from... All of the countries where we have started working now are volunteers themselves and work. So it's not always welcomed by all members of a community. But by and large, we've had very good reception.
And I would say that all these things change when it's your family member or your child and you want the best care. And you realize that there is something to be learned from a visiting team that will improve the quality of care for everyone that does change people's minds.
You know, funny you should mention that because one of my colleagues here in Utah, we were having dinner just two nights ago and he is just finishing his master's in public health. He's a trauma surgeon. And he said, well, how about we do another edition of this? He's getting his master's at the London School of Public Health and so he wants to carry this forward.
I think we've learned a lot with, yeah, with the COVID epidemic it focused a lot of people on what surgery and the surgical environment has to offer. both in terms of respiratory health, the systems for ventilation, a lot of hospitals and recovery rooms and ICUs were taken over. People saw the insides and the guts of what's in a hospital and what hospitals have to offer.
for public health in a pandemic. We also ran out of masks in many places and people took for granted that masks weren't necessary for hospitals, but possibly not anywhere else. And then all of a sudden there was a shortage of masks.
And now I think much of the public and certainly most of the medical community is more aware of the integration of surgical services, including ICUs, recovery rooms, anesthesia, and all of the principles that are needed to have safe surgery with good outcomes are also needed for certain pandemics.
And I think this is more incentive for people to understand how we integrate and that we're not two completely separate, diametrically opposed areas of healthcare.
Yeah, well, I just got back from Zimbabwe. So I was there for the COSEXA meeting. COSEXA is the College of Surgeons of East, Central, and Southern Africa. Getting back to pediatric urology, In many other countries, in fact, most of Sub-Saharan Africa, pediatric urology is done mostly by pediatric surgeons, mostly by urologists. And so the training is, there's a gap in training, I would say.
The pediatric surgeons don't have as much experience with scopes as we do in urology. but they have a lot of experience with newborns and newborn physiology and managing sick babies, especially sick babies in their low-resource countries. Urologists, on the other hand, have experience with stones, and as it turns out, stones are getting much more prevalent in kids than they ever were.
And so, scopes of all sorts. nephroscopes, cystoscopes, all the scopes we use are not familiar to most pediatric surgeons. And there really aren't any training programs at all in that region, in the eastern region, actually, or the west. And so newly, this is very exciting for me.
The West African College of Surgeons, as well as the East, Central, and Southern region, are starting to recognize that they need to build in their own training centers. It's been wonderful that IVU and other nonprofits have been going for many years to these places. But it's not sufficient. I mean, they really need to train their own, and we can help support that in good ways.
So we put on the first ever course. It was really well attended. It was a multidisciplinary course, and it spanned not just...
pediatric urology, but transitional urology to adulthood, because God willing, all of these kids will become adults, and they will transition through adolescence, but they still have problems they were born with, and they'll have to navigate adulthood, and sexuality, and for some of them, motherhood or paternity. These are problems that adult urologists deal with.
The people who care for them as babies need to look forward to them as adults and plan forward. And so now we're starting to integrate these communities and this I think is really the most exciting and most fun thing. I mean, I had a terrific time. I came home from Zimbabwe, you know, kind of walking on air because there are now a critical number of people
in the region who are trained, who are interested in training, and who I think are going to carry this forward so I can retire and hang out at the cattle ranch here in Wyoming.
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