End of Surgimed programme led by Campania region
(ANSAmed) – NAPLES, JANUARY 26 – Surgiland, a high-end training programme in microsurgery, minimally invasive surgery and experimental surgery involving Tunisia, Morocco and three Italian regions – Sicily, Emilia Romagna and the lead region Campania – has been hailed by all sides as a great success. With thirty courses in two years, 140 doctors were trained using the most advanced surgery and microsurgery technology, which will now help to train a new and more up to date generation of doctors in the various countries.
Conclusions on the scheme, part of the health and welfare division of the regional cooperation support programme APQ Mediterranean, were drawn today in Naples during a meeting between the parties involved in the initiative, first among them the Campania regional authority, which had a leading role in training Tunisian and Moroccan trainers, thanks to the expertise of the city’s Cardarelli Hospital.
“It has been a very significant project because it concerns health and involved different subjects working together,” said Francesco Calogero, the diplomatic consultant for international affairs for the President of Campania’s regional government, Stefano Caldoro. Calogero commented that “great attention to the allocation of resources is needed in cooperation and the results of projects must always be looked at in order to give them the continuity that the Campania region is ready to provide”.
Just as the 44 schemes from the Mediterranean Framework Programme Agreement (APQ) comes to an end, it is this attention to investments that will now allow eight new partnerships to be opened, thanks to the resources saved, according to Mariagrazia Rando, from the head office of development cooperation at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “The Surgiland project produced excellent results and thanks to the efforts of the Foreign Ministry and the Ministry for Economic Development, regions have worked together, regardless of political affiliation, to improve their ability to cooperate on development,” she said.
According to Antonio Verrico, who has overseen the scheme for the Ministry for Economic Development’s national unitary regional policy department, “the project’s significant results show that regions are able to create a network among themselves and with partner countries in the Mediterranean, and in the Balkans for other countries. This network activates a system that carries with it allied activities, thanks to the participation of public and private subjects, elements of cooperation are reinforced by commercial opportunities that private individuals will then have to develop”. In the case in question, the transfer of microsurgery knowledge could lead to a need to equip Tunisian and Moroccan hospitals with technologically advanced apparatus. “The programme has been a success,” says Chadli Dziri, who is responsible for the Surgiland scheme in Tunisia. “We have taken off and must now stay at a high level with these partnership projects. The identification of resources is always difficult but the network has been set up and I am no certain that it will go on”. Dziri pointed out that the doctors who attended the updated courses will now transfer “their knowledge to medical students and surgeons at the Charles Nicolle hospital in Tunis, which has over a thousand beds”. Charif Chefchaouni Al Mountacer, the head of the Ibn Sina hospital in Rabat, also expressed his satisfaction. “The new advanced teaching systems will greatly help the training of surgeons in Morocco”. (ANSAmed).
