Olive Kobusingye

Olive Chifefe Kobusingye is a Ugandan consultant trauma surgeon, emergency surgeon, accident injury epidemiologist and academic, who serves as a Senior Research Fellow at both Makerere University School of Public Health and the Institute for Social and Health Sciences of the University of South Africa. She heads the Trauma, Injury, & Disability (TRIAD) Project at Makerere University School of Public Health, where she coordinates the TRIAD graduate courses

Quotes

• 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.
  • [1]

• 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.
  • [2]

• While there might be a lot of pain and sacrifice, we certainly see joy as well. We save more patients than we lose, we get to help a lot of people, and that more than makes up for the bad times. In my field, ‘Accident & Emergency’, it is possible to see a patient turn around in a few minutes, and that makes it worth it.
  • [3]

• 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 Head of the Accident & Emergency at Mulago National Referral Hospital. Frustrated at the many needless injuries, especially from road traffic crashes, I chose to take on trauma care and injury prevention as the focus of my career.
  • [4]

• 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.
  • [5]