In general, university-based global health initiatives have tended to focus on expanding access to primary care. In the past, surgical programs may have been characterized by sporadic participation with little educational focus. However, there have been some notable exceptions with plastic surgery volunteer missions. We offer another model of regularly scheduled surgical trips to rural Haiti in plastic and general surgery. The goal of these trips is to reduce the burden of surgical disease and ultimately repair every cleft lip/palate in Haiti. Another principal objective is to accelerate the training of American residents through increased case load and personal interaction with attending surgeons in a concentrated period. Diversity of the case load and the overall number of surgeries performed by residents in a typical surgical trip outpaces the experiences available during a typical week in an American hospital setting. More importantly, we continue to provide ongoing training to Haitian nurses and surgeons in surgical techniques and postoperative care. Our postoperative complication rate has been relatively low. Our follow-up rates have been lower than 70% despite intensive attempts to maintain continued communication with our patients. Through our experiences in surgical care in rural Haiti, we were able to quickly ramp up our trauma and orthopedic surgical care immediately after the earthquake. Project Medishare and the University of Miami continue to operate a trauma and acute care hospital in Port au Prince. The hospital provides ongoing orthopedic, trauma, and neurosurgical expertise from the rotating teams of American surgeons and training of Haitian surgeons in modern surgical techniques. We believe that surgical residencies in the United States can improve their training programs and reduce global surgical burden of disease through consistent trips and working closely with country partners.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 1. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 05 December 2012.
All research outputs
#17,286,645
of 25,374,917 outputs
Outputs from Journal of Craniofacial Surgery
#846
of 4,552 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#133,627
of 202,252 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Journal of Craniofacial Surgery
#12
of 92 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 25,374,917 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 21st percentile – i.e., 21% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 4,552 research outputs from this source. They receive a mean Attention Score of 1.5. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 74% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 92 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 86% of its contemporaries.
