Tweets from "Updates in Anesthesia" course.

We had a very successful "Annual Updates in Anesthesia" course (our 9th) in Kumasi, Ghana. The organizers (as always) did a superb job, and the 250+ attendees were engaged, enthusiastic and stimulating.

Below are some tweet highlights from the course:

"So Long and Thanks For All The Fish"

This is my talk from the Extreme Affordability conference held in Salt Lake City 2012.

The other talks are here.

9th Annual Refresher Course Program

Below is the final program for our 9th Annual Refresher Course.

We're all looking forward to an informative and engaging couple of days.

Hope to see you all there.

Things I Like.

Here are some interesting posts / articles / videos that recently wandered onto my radar. Some may make it into my permanent links / videos pages; some may not.

• African aid: helpful or hazardous? - A look at the current structure of aid to Africa, and how it needs to change.

• The “Developing Country” Double Standard - (Partly) humorous take on the doublespeak involving 'developing' countries vs. 'developed' countries.

• Private finance is key to aid efforts - In 2010, Médecins Sans Frontières donations summed $1.1bn. Were it a country, MSF would have been the 2nd largest humanitarian donor after the US.

• “You can’t come here with European eyes” - A letter from Richard Dowden to John Humphreys on his recent trip to Liberia.

• Simon Moss - Africa Is Poor and 5 Other Myths

• Why Africa must make its own drugs

• Global Health Service Partnership - A very interesting approach to capacity building coupled with health care supply.

• The avoidable crisis of maternal death. - A shocking infographic from MSF.

• Female African Entrepreneurship - A fantastic infographic from the World Bank (via other folks).

• Africa needs research HR strategy - Africa's health research capacity remains uncoordinated, small-scale and driven from outside the continent.

Extreme Affordability Conference

Well, the first annual Center for Global Surgery conference is over.

As always after such events, I am left with a sense of enthusiasm, optimism and community. There are so many people from different fields and countries collaborating and using innovative approaches to the myriad problems facing the low resource world.

(And they're fun to hang out with too.)

Incomplete, biased and correct.

I was very sad to read an item on GhanaWeb about multiple deaths at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH). The article states that these deaths are due to faulty equipment and, consequently, doctors are refusing to carry out surgeries "for fear that the patients’ ailments might worsen at their hands".