Ahmed’s well-publicised, public approach rankles some members of a very conservative profession. Yet he says it represents one of the best ways to meet the World Health Organization’s call to “scale up transformative, high-quality education” and plug a predicted global shortfall of 15 million health workers by 2030. A report by the Lancet Commission on Global Surgery estimated in 2015 that 5 billion people lack access to safe, affordable surgical and anesthesia care, leading to about 17 million deaths annually. Saving lives will require a doubling of the surgical workforce, or an extra 2.2 million surgeons, anesthetists and obstetricians over 15 years, the report said.
“It’s not just that we have a shortage of health professionals, we also, as a consequence, have a shortage of teachers,” said Josip Car, an associate professor of health services outcomes research at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University’s Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine. Car is working in collaboration with the WHO on the world’s largest systematic review of evidence on the effectiveness of digital learning. It’s a field, he says, that is attracting “great interest,” but which requires careful evaluation. “The evidence appears to suggest that, on the whole, these technologies are likely to be equivalent to traditional modes of education,” Car said in a telephone interview. “If this turns out to be so, that’s very good news because many of them allow scalability and flexibility of learning.” Already, technological innovations are increasing the automation of diagnoses and personalised treatments, and medical schools are incorporating them into their teaching. For example, California’s Stanford Medicine is combining imaging from MRIs, CT scans and angiograms with a new software system to create a three-dimensional model that physicians and patients can see and manipulate.
“Medical education is ripe for disruption,” said Marc M Triola, associate dean for educational informatics at NYU Langone Health in New York. “Cutting-edge technologies such as virtual and augmented reality may quickly become standard-of-care and mainstream.”
Ahmed used Microsoft’s HoloLens headsets to virtually bring together surgeons from the BMI London Independent Hospital and Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai to operate together on a bowel-cancer patient in October. Each colleague was able to view tumor scans that appeared as 3D holograms, and could “see” each other as graphic avatars, standing and speaking as if together in the operating room at the Royal London Hospital. “My story is about connecting people globally,” Ahmed, 48, said in his office at the London Independent Hospital. An associate dean of Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, the Bangladesh-born surgeon performed the world’s first virtual reality operation recorded and streamed live in 360-degree, or immersive, video in 2016.
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