Global Scalpels | Episode 12: Dr Dominique Vervoort and Dr Nabeel Ashraf

As a country, creating a national long-term strategy to address barriers in your health system is a daunting task. Where do you start? What do you do if you fail? And how to you ensure long-term longevity. It is your responsibility to bring together key stake holders with different backgrounds including: health economics, surgery, business, advocacy, health policy, and so much more! This is where an NSOAP comes in. A National Surgical, Obstetric, and Anesthesia Plan (or NSOAP) is a national strategic plan that uses 6 pillars to strengthen the surgical system as a whole to expand surgical access across the country. The NSOAP is embedded in a national health plan and headed by the Ministry of Health of each country. Join us in this special episode as we talk with two guests about the creation of the NSOAP of Pakistan as well as the power of social media. With more than 500 million Twitter tweets being tweeted daily, how can you raise your voice to bring attention to global surgery? Global Surgery consists of people from different sectors (tech, advocacy, surgeons, and more), different surgical specialities, and different counties, one of the miracles of social media is that there is very minimal barrier to joining and your reach can be much wider than you ever thought possible. The #globalsurgery movement has made huge strides in brining together the global surgery movement. How are you going to leverage your social media to make your mark? And what are the potential changes you could influence? You won’t want to miss this episode!

Dr Dominique Vervoort and Dr Nabeel Ashraf: Research Associates at Harvard PGSSC, Pakistan NSOAP, InciSioN Founder, and Johns Hopkins MPH/MBA Student

BELGIUM/PAKISTAN

“Health Systems, NSOAPs, and Social Media”

Dr Dominique Vervoort is a medical doctor from Belgium and co-Founder of InciSioN – the International Student Surgical Network. He is a current MPH/MBA dual degree student at Johns Hopkins. Previously, Dominique completed the Paul Farmer Global Surgery Fellowship at Harvard Medical School, where he worked on National Surgical, Obstetric, and Anesthesia planning in Pakistan and West Africa. Dominique has written widely on inequity and gender disparities within global health, and has been featured in the New York Times, JAMA, and leading cardiac surgery journals. After his dual degree at Johns Hopkins, he intends to pursue a career in pediatric cardiac surgery with particular interests in capacity-building programs and low-cost surgical innovation.

Dr Nabeel Ashraf, is a medical doctor from Karachi, Pakistan. He completed the Paul Farmer Global Surgery Research Fellowship at the PGSSC. He has worked with Pakistan’s Ministry of Health on national level projects such as the National Vision for Surgical Care 2025. To deal with the COVID Pandemic in Pakistan, Nabeel was part of the core teams that set up and operationalized a 600 bed Field Isolation Center (FIC) and a 148 bed High Dependency Unit (HDU) in Karachi. Nabeel is currently looking forward to completing his training as a surgeon and public health student. In the future he plans to dive deeper into health system research and wants to develop and implement scalable intervention required to optimize fragmented health systems and improve healthcare and surgical care access across the world. He is committed to the vision of achieving social justice globally.