The link – a tale of life, lions, and laparoscopic surgery

These enabled African surgeons to be trained in the latest laparoscopic techniques. He explains how the team involved overcame the challenges of creating video and Internet connections between hospitals nearly 5,000 miles apart.

Colin Dobbyne, CEO of Cambridge-based product development consultancy, Big Blue Solutions, describes how he worked with surgeons at a Northumbrian hospital to establish communications links with their counterparts at a hospital in Tanzania that enabled the African surgeons to be trained in the latest laparoscopic techniques. He highlights the how the team overcame the challenges of creating video and Internet connections between hospitals nearly 5,000 miles apart in the days when Internet technology was far less advanced, and how the close working relationships formed a decade ago still flourish today – to the benefit of surgeons and patients in both countries. 

I believe that simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication: an Eames lounge chair, a Montblanc ink pen and, of course, virtually anything that comes out of the design monolith that is Apple. Avoid the temptation to ‘over design’, and trick something up for the sake of it – disrupt, but disrupt beautifully. I have always applied this belief to my work as a product designer, working with clients to develop clear, straightforward solutions to problems people may never even have realised they had. With a career spent primarily in the healthcare field, this remains my particular area of interest. I am passionately committed to developing technology that empowers surgeons to make better decisions; by gathering instantly accessible data during procedures, clinical teams will not only be able to make better-informed decisions during surgery, but will also be able to reflect on and change future procedures after the event.  This represents a huge move away from the current norm, instead encouraging surgeons to learn from what happens and to use it to move surgery forward.