News

Almost one third of the global burden of disease can be attributed to diseases that require surgical care. In Cameroon, up to one third of patients that underwent an operation are developing a surgical site infection. To improve this situation, a hospital partnership between the Charité Berlin – Center for Septic Surgery of the Center for Musculoskeletal Surgery and the two local partners, the Evangelical Hospital Mbouo and the Evangelical University of Cameroon was established. This partnership is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development together with the Else-Kröner-Fresenius-Foundation. The PRO-IMPLANT FOUNDATION with its founder PD Dr. Andrej Trampuz is actively supporting this partnership from the beginning, especially by transfer of competencies and by personal means.

“For the Cameroonian hospital, I see the great advantage of the partnership in the fact that a lot can be achieved with relatively simple measures by improving hygiene and air quality in the operating theater and optimizing sterilization,” explains PD Dr. Andrej Trampuz.

Dr. Christian Doll, who worked at the Center for Septic Surgery at the Charité, has established the initiative to start this partnership. He has been working as a surgeon in Cameroon from 2016 to 2019 and served as the personal link between the European and the Cameroonian partners; having returned to Germany back in 2019, he continues to manage this successful partnership.

The first funding period (2017 – 2019) of this German-Cameroonian hospital partnership aimed to establish a knowledge, competence and technology transfer in the field of prevention, diagnosis and treatment of nosocomial and postoperative infections. In these first two years of the project, a context-adapted low-cost ventilation system for operating theaters was developed and installed on-site in cooperation with CAMFIL, a leading manufacturer for air filtration system; diagnostics in the microbiology laboratory were optimized and the quality of the X-ray images was significantly increased by replacing the outdated X-ray machines; many competency-transfer workshops were carried out at the Cameroonian hospital and university and a team of the Cameroonian partners came over to us for a training visit.

The follow-up funding for the project (2019-2021) now relates to the improvement of occupational and patient safety in the operating theater and intensive care unit, as well as the south-south transfer of expertise and technology from the two local partners to hospitals in the region, so that the improvements of the first project phase can be passed on to other local partner hospitals.

Furthermore, an extra hospital partnership funding project for 2021 has been accepted to fight COVID-19 at our Cameroonian partner institutions: Urgently needed oxygen concentrators and intensive-care ventilators are right now on their way to Cameroon to improve COVID-19 care at our partner hospital; laboratory equipment for SARS-CoV-2 PCR testing, with the support of the molecular diagnostics company QIAGEN, will improve diagnostic and research capabilities of our partner university.

Further information regarding our hospital partnership project can be found at:

General Information: https://hospitalpartnerships.org/

First project period: https://hospitalpartnerships.org/projects/qualit%C3%A4tsst%C3%A4rkung-in-der-prophylaxe-diagnose-und-behandlung-von-postoperativen-und-muskuloskeletale

Second project period: https://hospitalpartnerships.org/projects/patientensicherheit-und-arbeitssicherheit-in-der-chirurgie-in-mbouo-kamerun

Interview Andrej Trampuz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZ4EST4wxQk

Interview Christian Doll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dt2ZaUObzQ

Interview Jean-Blaise Kenmogne (Cameroonian University): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewE9-YpeF6g