Joel Gelman, MD, on teaching urethral stricture surgery internationally

In this video, Joel Gelman, MD, discusses his international urology work in Vietnam and Thailand. Gelman is a UCI Health urologist and a professor of urology at UCI School of Medicine.

Transcription:

My efforts have been, for the last 10 years, focused on international global health outreach in Vietnam and more recently, Thailand. My first trip was to Hue, Vietnam, where I went as part of a trip organized by International Volunteers of Urology, also called IVU Med. And that was an opportunity for me to experience health care in urology in a low middle-income country where resources were very limited, and I worked with very wonderful doctors and helped many people who otherwise did not have access to the expertise that I was fortunate to obtain from my mentor and my training. But I also recognized that if I really wanted to have an impact beyond the patients I helped, it would be to train somebody to do the surgery, which is sort of a motto for IVU Med, which is, teach one, reach many, or teach a man to fish. But if you just go some place for a couple weeks, their skills may increase a little bit, but not significantly. So I was fortunate to identify somebody in Ho Chi Minh City...who had an interest in becoming the country's first expert in urethral stricture surgery, who worked at an institution with a supportive hospital director where there was sufficient infrastructure. I developed that relationship over a period of years, where he came to our institution to observe. I repeatedly worked with only him, exclusively. My goal in the trip was not to see how many patients I could operate on, how many doctors I could train, [it was] to help 1 person train. And with that, we kept a database, and we found that the success rate of certain operations went from what was reported in certain low and middle-income countries to be 16% to 98%. And that was presented at the AUA and international meetings, and we recently obtained IRB approval, and we are completing the manuscript to describe our results. But this doctor now has operated on over 1000 people with this success rate, and we want to duplicate that in Thailand, and so we've now expanded our way of approaching global outreach to Thailand, and their outcomes have improved already, and that was presented at this year's AUA.

This transcription was edited for clarity.