The cost of mismanaged medical services culminating in lives needlessly lost was always before me. It was more evident during my year as the Acting H… - Olive Kobusingye

I welcome the opportunity to serve as a member of the iRAP Board to help make safer roads a reality in the African region. Many African countries combine young and burgeoning populations with rapid and poorly planned urbanisation and motorisation.

The resulting toll of road traffic crashes and injuries is a heavy cost on communities and countries. iRAP’s work on making roads safer for all road users will be key to the region’s efforts to reduce the crippling burden of unsafe roads.

That also enabled me to see beyond the immediate problems, to the bigger ones that hamper care in LMICs. In trauma, patients are still getting debilitating osteomyelitis because there is not enough saline to carry out a decent debridement (the process of removing unhealthy tissue from the body). Perhaps the surgical community needs to begin addressing upstream factors which make our surgical practice an impossible task.