Interplast CEO Cameron Glover, Dr Scott Buadromo, Akisi Dovibua, Reena Gauchan, Dr Tanveer Ahmed and PolyNovo CEO Swami Raote attending ANZBA 2023.
Interplast scholarships change futures. We’re passionate about developing the next generation of medical leaders through training, exposure to new technology and ways of working, and cultural exchange. We build the capacity of local medical professionals in our partner countries by equipping them with new skills and knowledge to provide high quality treatment to their patients and communities.
In September, we were delighted to be able to bring five scholarship recipients from across the Asia Pacific to the Australia & New Zealand Burn Association (ANZBA) annual conference in Melbourne.
Inspired by the success of our new partnership, medical technology and device company PolyNovo sponsored four of the Interplast scholarships. Scott Buadromo, Akisi Dovibua and Mereia Seru travelled from Fiji and Tanveer Ahmed travelled from Bangladesh to the ANZBA conference for the opportunity to learn new skills and build lasting networks.
Dr Scott Buadromo is a Principal Medical Officer (General Surgery) at the Labasa Hospital in Fiji, where he is currently undertaking his specialist training in Plastic Surgery.
He knows the importance of continual learning, saying “my involvement in plastics is mostly due to my mentor Dr Semesa who, early in my training, had just returned from his plastics training attachment in Hobart, which was supported through Interplast. I was fortunate enough to be recruited into his department, and I saw the potential of what greater education and more training will allow people to have. They come back with a lot more to offer the country than what they’ve already been practicing. A chance to grow in leaps and bounds all made possible through one person’s advancement.”
“I’m now very grateful to have been at the ANZBA Conference 2023 in Melbourne, thanks to Interplast and PolyNovo. The workshops and presentations have been an eye opener and we’re very thankful that PolyNovo’s given us this opportunity and we look forward to using their products that have given us and our patients great results so far.”
“Definitely one of the best things about attending these conferences is meeting new people and making new networks. We always appreciate their availability and we’ve never met anyone who has refused the opportunity to work alongside us. We’ve always used this as an opportunity to establish a network. When we go back, we continue ongoing discussions and sharing information and hopefully even greater things will be borne from that”.
Dr Buadromo and the other scholarship recipients from Fiji have a deeper connection with the team at PolyNovo and their products. Earlier in 2023, working alongside the visiting Interplast team on complex burns cases, they had enormous success using a PolyNovo product for the very first time in Fiji. The product, Novosorb® BTM is a man-made synthetic material that can be used to temporarily close a wound and aid the body in generating new tissue.
Dr Scott Buadromo presenting a case study on the first Pacific Island NovoSorb® BTM Trial.
One of the patients successfully treated was a young boy named Joseph, whose story and success we celebrated back in August.
Dr Scott Buadromo recenty said of the PolyNovo product, “three trials in and we’ve seen very good results despite our conditions in Fiji being really challenging. We don’t have a lot of staff to keep an eye on a lot of dressings, we don’t have good sterile infection control situations, but these dressings have done well despite all that. It’s one of our trump cards in our arsenal of things we can deliver to our patients.”
Chloe Lister, Territory Sales Manager at PolyNovo said, “the story was pretty incredible of this young boy, Joseph who had a contracture at the back of his knee from a burn injury. They surgically excised the contracture and applied NovoSorb® BTM, and over a period of weeks they integrated and grafted him and the result was he was able to then walk and run again which is amazing. It’s giving me chills right now thinking about it, but to see the video of him playing soccer was quite emotional – it was probably one of the highlights of my career.”
Cameron Glover, CEO of Interplast summed up in saying, “our life-changing work can’t happen in isolation. By partnering with PolyNovo and the use of NovoSorb® BTM in Fiji, we were able to change the life of one individual, then a second, and then a third. By partnering with PolyNovo we will continue to change lives, and for that we are incredibly grateful.”
To find out more about sponsoring a scholarship and supporting the next generation of medical leaders, visit our Scholarships page.
