A TEAM of surgeons from Oxford has returned from a three-week visit to Africa where they taught local health workers how to improve the lives of people with life-changing conditions.

Experts from the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre (NOC) in Headington showed surgeons, doctors and nurses from Ethiopia and Zimbabwe how to treat children born with club foot, manage bone tumours and open fractures, and trained them in hip and knee surgery.

They worked with more than 100 health practitioners between September and October on three training courses.

Chris Lavy, a consultant orthopaedic and spine surgeon at NOC, first worked with a team of surgeons and physiotherapists from the UK, Ethiopia, the Netherlands, Zimbabwe and Norway to teach 31 carers how to treat club foot.

Children with the condition are born with their feet pointing down and inwards and with the soles of their feet backwards. One in 700 newborns are affected in Africa.

Mr Lavy and his team taught how to manipulate the foot gently into a better position and put it in a cast.

He said: said: “It is wonderful to see UK colleagues help strengthen the health workforce overseas in places where there is a real shortage of health workers.

“These training courses have helped to improve care for many patients affected by musculoskeletal conditions.

“Moreover, our teams have returned to the UK with a renewed commitment and passion for their clinical practice here.”

During the second course, NOC surgeons Max Gibbons and Duncan Whitwell and surgical consultant Henk Giele trained 37 surgeons in Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa to manage bone tumours without necessarily resorting to amputation. They also showed them how to operate on open fractures, which are frequent in the area due to road accidents.

Mr Gibbons said: “Surgeons and patients are the same the world over. What this course gave to all of us was a greater understanding of how we share the same problems. Courses such as these are an opportunity to share all we know and have experienced, which is of great benefit to our future patients.

“To give an example, a patient arrived at the hospital on the last day with severe trauma due to an animal bite. The local surgeons and visiting faculty discussed how to avoid amputation for this patient with a flap and soft tissue reconstruction technique learnt on a cadaver earlier in the day.”

Mr Gibbons travelled to Zimbabwe with NOC consultant orthopaedic surgeons Hemant Pandit, Chris Lavy, Roger Gundle, Adrian Taylor, Chris Dodd, while consultant anaesthetist David Pigott travelled to Zimbabwe to train 35 orthopaedic practitioners from Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe in hip and knee surgery.

Dr Munyaradzi Ndekwere, a surgical trainee, said: “Thank you very much for a wonderful and very insightful course – it really opened my eyes to the infinite possibility and needs of orthopaedics in Africa.”