Welcome Dr. Innocent Okello
Dr. Innocent Okello
The University of Alberta, Department of Surgery and the Office of Global Surgery would like to welcome Dr. Innocent Okello to Edmonton. Dr. Okello comes to us as a visiting fellow for pediatric surgery and will be working with the Department for the span of one year, starting July 2021. This talented pediatric surgeon comes to us from Kampala, Uganda. In is own right, Dr. Okello is well accomplished in pediatric surgery, and he has come to advance his skillset and carry on that knowledge back to Uganda. “My interests are to extend surgical care to many more children in Uganda” says Dr. Okello.
His primary goal is to learn techniques in minimal invasive surgery (MIS), trauma, oncology as well as further knowledge in other fields of pediatric surgery. However, the additional skills he will absorb through working with the University of Alberta and the Stollery Children’s Hospital Foundation will be much greater than learning MIS and other techniques. Here he will see how differently we run a health system, how a surgical service is delivered, how quality improvement occurs and what a resident’s education looks like in Canada. Dr. Okello will be able to take this knowledge home and immediately implement some of these aspects, while lead his team to make appropriate systems changes, where they make sense, to advance children’s care in Uganda.
This exchange is facilitated by the Office of Global Surgery (OGS) where foundations of the OGS are built on a framework around impactful initiatives for global surgery in marginalized areas. The OGS collaborated closely with the Division of Pediatric Surgery and the Stollery Children’s Hospital Foundation to realize this initiative. Dr. Abdullah Saleh, Director of the OGS and Director of the new Pediatric Global Surgery Fellowship, says “The aim of the OGS is to focus less on going (into a country) to operate, but more on capacity building, strengthening systems and educating those within that system. This exchange is hopefully the first of many for this (Pediatric Global Surgery) Fellowship. With support and funding, this model can be easily replicated in all divisions of surgery, and other departments and beyond. There is so much opportunity here to learn about areas with alternative resource capacity and build leadership for systems thinking both with our own healthcare professionals here and abroad to ameliorate the lives of children and adults.”
Without the generous support and shared vision by the Stollery Children’s Hospital Foundation, this exchange would not be happening. The Office of Global Surgery would like to thank the Foundation for their support and impact on this initiative.