Huw David and Simon Coleridge have recently returned from a hectic fact finding visit to a hospital in India.

Along with colleagues specialising in ophthalmology and anaesthetics, they were the personal guests of Dr Sanjay Maheshwari, Head and Medical Director of the M. P. Birla Hospital in Satna, Central India. They were tasked with identifying ways in which to provide training and support for the orthopaedic consultants working at the hospital.

They have since presented their findings and recommendations to Dr. Maheshwari and his team and hope to be able to invite some of Satna’s orthopaedic surgeons to Devon later this year where they will receive further training in key areas including total knee replacement surgery and in the latest techniques of trauma management under Huw and Simon’s supervision. It is hoped that the surgeons will be able to take these newly learnt skills back to India and so enhance the treatment they can provide to their own patients. In addition, the team at VITA Orthopaedics are looking into the possibility of using Telemedicine in order to facilitate the discussion on the management of difficult cases our friends in India might encounter.

As a serving Royal Air Force medical officer, David Stitson has seen active service as a deployed Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgeon in Iraq and Afghanistan.

David has recently returned from his latest military deployment, this time to Afghanistan. Based at Camp Bastion in Helmand Province, David worked at the UK Field Hospital treating injured servicemen from the UK, USA and other Allied Nations together with Afghan Army and Police personnel.

Although the hours were often long, David enjoyed the challenges involved in managing severe and often multiple injuries in the field hospital environment.

David Stitson recently visited Nanyuki in rural Kenya as part of an orthopaedic team representing the Kenya Orthopaedic Project.

The first aim of the visit was to provide orthopaedic and trauma procedures that either could not be provided locally or could not be afforded by the patient. The second aim was to provide support and education to the local medical and nursing staff.

Undertaking modern orthopaedic procedures in a third world environment presented a variety of interesting challenges not least of which was operating without a reliable image intensifier to provide intra-operative X-rays. Despite this David was able to perform the first tibial nail insertion done in Nanyuki for a patient who had been trampled by an elephant several months earlier and whose fracture had not healed. Not a mechanism of injury often encountered in Plymouth!

Simon Coleridge is also involved with the Kenya Orthopaedic Project. Simon joined a similar trip, but on that occasion travelled to Mombassa, providing trauma surgery in a third world urban environment where poverty is rife and accidents and trauma are unfortunately all too common.