Minimial invasive surgery training essential effective surgery

The Port Moresby General Hospital is now going into sub-specialized areas where the need of minimal invasive surgery will play a significant role going forward.

In a collaborative effort, the medical doctors and nurses of Port Moresby General Hospital underwent this training with the Chinese Medical Team over the last eleven months and the training concluded earlier this week.

Chief Surgeon of the Department of Health Dr. Hoxxen Okti Poki said minimal invasive surgery simply means that surgery is now being done using a technology and the advancement in medicine that now allows surgery tobe done with a very minimal cut or wound that they will make to the tummy.

Surgery makes the patient have less pain and take a quicker time to recover, and the wound is very minimal where the patients feel a lot better so they can be discharged from the hospital very quickly.

“This is especially true for abdominal surgery, surgery in the abdomen, and including surgery to the intestines, surgery to the kidneys, surgery to the prostate, and for females, the surgery to the uterus, to the ovaries, all those surgeries can now be performed with this minimal invasive, what we call minimal invasive surgery, and that's level of training.

“So the world is now going into minimal invasive surgery. In PNG, over many, many years, we did not have the technology, especially here in what must be a general hospital, or we did not have advanced training, we did not have the people to train us.

“You know, it was kind of not a very developed program. So with this contribution by the Chinese medical team that have come now, andsince 2022, when we started this program, our doctors are now trained with the skills to do this minimal invasive surgery,” Dr. Poki said.

He added that this training is not just the transfer of skills, but they are also getting some assistance in terms of equipment that they need to do minimal invasive surgery and consumables.

Dr. Poki said going forward they will work with the Chinese government in these areas for skills and training.

He said the cost of having these essential equipment will be costly.

“These equipment will cost a lot of money. So with a lot of improved funding from the government and even corporate funding from corporate sectors will be a great help to this hospital to equip, to provide those equipment to support what we need.

“So it's not something the hospital can do alone, but we need a lot of support from our partners,” Dr. Poki said.