Charles Leads Surgical Care Advancement Initiative in Malawi

December 11, 2009 -- As part of UNC's surgical initiative in Malawi, Dr. Anthony Charles, UNC Trauma and Critical Care Surgery, and a volunteer surgery team from UNC travel to Malawi regularly to provide surgical care, but Dr. Charles aims to make adequate surgical care permanently accessible to Malawians. "Currently, there are only 15 trained Malawian surgeons of any specialty in the entire country of 14 million people." However, Dr. Charles hopes to change that by initiating a five-year surgical residency program to train Malawian doctors to become surgeons, implementing a patient data collection database to aid surgeons to provide the most effective care, and enouraging a long-term sustainablity of the changes through policy.

Dr. Charles and research assistant, Jennifer Doorey, pose with Malawian children.