The Medical Director of the National Orthopaedic Hospital Igbobi, Dr. Mustapha Alimi, has said that the hospital is collaborating with various organisations to provide further staff training on limb deformity.

Chief Medical Director National Orthopedic Hospital Igbobi, Dr. Mutapha Alimi, and team of surgeons from SIGN Fracture Care International, US, who attended the recent Advanced Limb Deformity Conference titled: Train the Trainers Course, held in Lagos

He also said one of the ways of achieving this is by bringing foreign specialists to share their technical expertise with the hospital’s medical personnel.

Alimi said this in Lagos at the Advanced Limb Deformity Workshop titled ‘Train the Trainers Course’ which held at the hospital.

American surgeons, who attended the event, trained orthopaedic surgeons from all over Nigeria in conjunction with the Limb Lengthening and Reconstruction Society of Nigeria which is an affiliate of the Nigeria Orthopaedic Association.

According to Alimi: “This specialty that is coming up now, which is limb deformity correction with external devices, has some advantages: it gives new life to children who have k-legs, bow- legs, etc and it provides better success than we used to achieve.

“We are collaborating with different institutions that are doing what we want to do. There are two ways we do the collaboration: we support our personnel to go there, learn and come back; that is expensive. Another way is bringing those people here. This has more advantages because they will use our own tools to teach us how to do such procedures. That way, more of our people will be trained with the limited resources available.

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“We are happy to have the programme here in Nigeria. We are still going to have more programmes like this. We had one earlier this year and we are still going to be having one by July. And they are going to use our own tools. That will increase the capacity of our services.

We have a very long standing relationship with SIGN Network. Before the programme, we had sent some of our personnel to the US and they are doing wonderfully well. Our patients are happy because of the good services they are receiving from our doctors. So why won’t they appreciate it. SIGN Network even subsidises their materials and gives us implants for our patients.”

The training was conducted by some foreign experts on limb deformity from SIGN Fracture Care International, US.

They include Dr. Richard Gellman, Dr. Ken Thomas and Dr. Raymond Liu.

Speaking earlier, Dr. Gellman of the SIGN Fracture Care International said the focus of the 20-year-old organisation is to help treat people with fractures, internationally.

He said:“We have reached out to 240,000 people world-wide in fifteen African countries and fifty hospitals. Our focus in African nations is to train African surgeons on techniques of fracture management and deformity correction.

“Nigerian Surgeons are very receptive to training on new techniques of deformity correction. We can tell you that the Nigerian surgeons are some of the best surgeons we have met so far.

Nigeria is at the forefront of surgical practice in Africa that is one of the reasons we decided to use this centre for this training.’’