I recently returned from my first in-person College of Surgeons of East, Central, and Southern Africa (COSECSA) annual meeting, held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. For COSECSA members and trainees, the first week of December is notable each year for surgeons and residents from more than 14 African countries gathering for the annual fellowship-level exams, general meeting, and scientific conference.
Since 2018, the Association for Academic Surgery has partnered with the Annals of African Surgery (yes, that’s double AAS) and COSECSA to offer the Fundamentals of Surgical Research Course. With plans for the course to be fully COSECSA led within two years, we set a 2023 goal to increase the number of African speakers to 100% if possible. We nearly reached that goal with more than 80% of our speakers living full time in a COSECSA country!
We also set out to gather more data on who would be attending the course, to help guide modification of the course to best serve the east, central, and southern African attendees. Through the process, we realized that more than two thirds of the registrants were locals- surgeons, residents, and students from Ethiopia. Concurrently, our team contacted several Ethiopian Surgical Society members, all surgeons and researchers, who were interested in teaching and came highly recommended through the COSECSA networks. The result was a true contextualization of course content for the participants.
One example of the contextualization can be found in the below slide. Dr. Tihitena Negussie, Associate Professor of Pediatric Surgery in Addis Ababa and the Global Clinical Director for Lifebox, gave the “Introduction to Quality Improvement” lecture and used the analogy of growing, roasting, and drinking coffee as a demonstrative example (photo below, shared with permission). The audience was very engaged as she used a process well known to Ethiopians. For the rest of us visitors, we got to learn about the coffee process and culture while simultaneously learning about QI research.
There were 45 attendees, 15 speakers, and 7 additional volunteer mentors at the 2023 COSECSA FSRC, for almost 70 participants in total. Dr. Catherine Mohr, President of The Intuitive Foundation which sponsored the event, created a worksheet for the attendees to complete during the day that was complimentary to the session themes. There were great times of both large group learning as well as small group and one-on-one advice.
Each year, the COSECSA meeting is hosted by a different member country. Each year also, COSECSA fellows, residents, and students from the host country usually comprise the largest percentage of attendees at the meeting and therefore the FSRC course as well. It is my hope that highlighting local surgeon-researchers as the teaching faculty for the AAS-AAS-COSECSA FSRC course each year will continue, for the benefit of all those in attendance.
Britney L. Grayson, MD, PhD, FAAP, FACS, FCS(ECSA)