A Surrey Memorial Hospital surgeon led a team of health-care workers on a mission to Afghanistan in October to help educate health-care workers in the nation香蕉视频直播檚 capital. 

"Afghanistan is considered a very difficult place to go to because it's been in war for over four decades," said Dr. Ahmad Ashrafi, the regional division head of thoracic香蕉视频直播痵urgery at Surrey Memorial Hospital. As a result, many essential services have been impacted, including health care. 

"I've always been interested in global health and global surgery, 香蕉视频直播� partly because of my own life journey. I was an immigrant in Canada, and I was born in Afghanistan," Ashrafi said. He left with his family in 1983. 

Several years ago, a friend invited him on a medical humanitarian trip to start a thoracic surgery program at the National Cancer Centre in Mongolia. Over the years, Ashrafi returned several times with a team to help the hospital establish a program to improve their skills in minimally invasive surgery. 

In 2023, Ashrafi was invited to Uzbekistan.  

"Once again, the goal was really to establish a program and share the knowledge and experience and expertise that we have in Canada with them," Ashrafi said. "The goal is never medical tourism or going there and performing procedures. My interest is always to build a sustainable program and help colleagues around the world benefit from the types of surgery that we perform here." 

A childhood friend from Afghanistan asked Ashrafi if he could come and set up a similar program there. 

Surgical, critical care teams travel to Kabul 

In March 2024, he travelled to Afghanistan and visited the Ali Abad Teaching Hospital in the capital, Kabul, to get a feel for the situation there. He found the doctors and nurses were "very keen" to have a team from Canada come and share their medical knowledge.

Ashrafi returned to Canada to set up the team, which ended up consisting of anesthesiologist Dr. Jean Gelinas; registered critical care nurses Tayne Bong and Sajia Yousofi; Dorothy Suliga, a nurse practitioner in thoracic surgery from Surrey Memorial Hospital; and Dr. Angela Babuk, an intensivist and Island Health medical director.

Ashrafi's childhood friend, Lais Hamidi, a medical engineer, also came on the trip. He helped create a backup system for power outages in the operating room.

"These colleagues had this on their bucket list, to one day be able to contribute to a medical mission." Ashrafi said.  

The team travelled to Afghanistan on Oct. 18 and spent about two weeks there, performing several operations and doing a lot of teaching, plus hosting a symposium for GI tract malignancies that included lectures and hands-on training.

The team worked alongside health-care workers at Ali Abad Teaching Hospital.

"They were very humble and open to learning, and they also had a lot of insight and understanding that what they were doing is essentially almost half a century old ... and they were there in need of resources and knowledge and expertise," Ashrafi said.

The group was divided into two teams: surgical and critical care. Suliga, Ashrafi and Gelinas were on the surgical team, and Bong, Yousofi and Babuk were on the critical care team.

Ashrafi said the trip would not have been possible without Gelinas香蕉视频直播� anesthesiology expertise.

Anesthesiology expertise critical to mission

"Without him, my job would not have been possible. It would have been impossible to do what I did without his input and work, because we need anaesthesia for successful surgery," he said. "The faculty knowledge of anaesthesia over there is a much bigger problem than surgical knowledge.香蕉视频直播�

Gelinas, who is no stranger to medical humanitarian trips, was eager to join Ashrafi.

"One of the things I like so much about the mission is that there's such an emphasis on the transmission of knowledge, the transmission of information," Gelinas said.

The decades of war in Afghanistan have had a significant impact on health care in the country.

"The medical infrastructure has been so heavily damaged, including the training of the local anesthesiologists, it's just sad how little training they get before they're pushed out to give care to patients," Gelinas said.  

Compared to the 香蕉视频直播渋ntense education香蕉视频直播� anesthesiologists receive in Canada, Gelinas said training is a 香蕉视频直播減atchwork香蕉视频直播� in Afghanistan.  

The kindness of the Afghans blew away Gelinas.

"Everybody was so glad that we were there. Just overwhelming how generous they were, and they kept on feeding us."

Afghan hospitality 香蕉视频直播榰nmatched香蕉视频直播�

The resilience and the reception of the Afghani people also stood out to Suliga.

"I thought we would face barriers such as language or cultural, and there were cultural differences, but it was like in this really embracing one another's cultures and customs and the way we do things," Suliga said. "They were so incredibly receptive to it all and welcoming to us. Ashafi says that the Afghan people have hospitality that's unmatched, and I definitely felt like that when I was there."

Many of the team members have kept in contact with the local health-care workers since they left.

"They've also been messaging me with videos to show how they're doing rounds, and they're still doing what we did and doing it in that structure," Suliga said.

This trip was personal for Yousofi as she was born in Afghanstan and had not been back since she left with her family when she was three years old.

"Being back in the country where my roots lie, where my identity was first shaped, was both grounding and heartbreaking," Yousofi said. "As a nurse, I香蕉视频直播檝e been blessed to grow in a country like Canada, where I香蕉视频直播檝e had access to education, resources, and opportunities that allowed me to help others. But stepping into a place that still feels like home, yet seeing the struggles and lack of the most basic resources, was devastating."

Yousofi has been an ICU nurse for 13 years, and her objective on the trip was to train other critical care nurses and provide care to patients in the ICU.

"Our goal was to empower the health-care team members there to keep on going despite the limited resources that they have," Yousofi said. "They're very hard-working people, as we all witnessed that, and just being there and next to them, giving them support, empower them and telling them you're doing your best with what you have."

Similar to Yousofi, Bong had always wanted to go on a global medical mission, so when the opportunity arose to join Ashrafi, she jumped aboard.

Yousofi and Bong were with the nurses and had expected to teach them some advanced cardiovascular life support techniques (ACLS) but quickly realized they needed to start with more basic skills like chest compressions. One nurse told Yousofi that her first time performing a chest compression was during training with them, and she had been a nurse for 12 years.

Bong noticed a difference in the medical knowledge of male and female health-care workers. This likely comes down to the men having more opportunities to get an education and learn, while the women, 香蕉视频直播渨ho are very capable and who are great nurses, don't know as much as the men," Bong said. "So we had to tailor our teachings.香蕉视频直播�

Babuk 香蕉视频直播� whose father is Afghan but who had not been to the country since she was four years old - was struck by how open the local health-care workers were to input and by how motivated they were to provide a higher standard of care.

Because the Afghan workers were so keen to get the Canadians香蕉视频直播� recommendations, Babuk ended up working on a comprehensive critical care program plan for them. The plan is almost complete and "they're already starting to implement some of the changes that we recommended, which is really cool to see," Babuk said.

Babuk has continued to meet over Zoom with medical administrators to make final adjustments to the plan based on feedback.

Ashrafi hopes to bring a team back, but it will be a "wait and see" situation, as Afghanistan's future can change daily due to internal and international politics.