If anyone deserves to be called the Phileas Fogg of surgery, it is the Galician diego gonzalez. The number of countries in which the native of A Coruña has operated has already reached three figures; and among his patients there are the same important figures of the Spanish media scene (with examples such as Lucía Pombo or David Broncano) as well as people without resources in the most impoverished corners of the planet.
González is also a pioneer in a revolutionary technique that allows complex procedures to be carried out in the most inaccessible parts of the human interior. just a little hole. Now, his new project promises to bring this technology to those who need it most without technical or financial resources being any kind of barrier. To this end, he presents the foundation that bears his name and which promises to “create a mobile hospital equipped with all the means to perform very complex minimally invasive surgeries.”
“Create a mobile hospital with all the technology”
according to account 20minutos, The idea of the Diego González Foundation was born from his experiences mainly in Africa. “I go there a lot, and many times I find myself with the problem of the material. Doing minimally invasive surgery in Africa is very complicated; many times we don’t have everything we need and they are very complex surgeries. So, every time I go I spend months organizing it to get the material”.
“And many times it doesn’t even arrive,” he adds. “It has happened to me that I spend three months preparing the trip and that things like the staplers that I have obtained by donations remain in customs or are confiscated. Or the high definition tower it doesn’t work because we are missing a nutor the power goes out… To avoid this type of problem we have thought of creating the foundation”, he says.
“The idea is to create a mobile hospital equipped with all the technology to perform minimally invasive lung surgeries, so that I can go to operate with guarantees, knowing that I have everything I need there: high-definition towers, staplers, instruments…”.
“What we propose is more complex than what exists”
“Also”, he continues, “we intend to reach patients who ask us in these countries whose cases are dramatic, who do not provide a solution and who perhaps have even done something wrong by operating on them previously. For some we want to bring them and operate them here; Next March 13 we are going to operate on the first patient with the foundation, bringing her from Peru”.
“For example, this case is about a 25-year-old girl without resources who has had a bad operation twice and they don’t give her any hope there, but it’s a surgery that we believe is safe.”í we can do here“, details González.
The path is already underway: “We are talking to a lot of companies so that they help us with donations and start equipping everything. It is complicated; although it is true that there are mobile military units, they are prepared for urgent and minor things; what we propose is something much more complex that doesn’t exist so far.”
“You have to equip a truck with an entire operating room”
And it is that the procedures carried out by González often require highly advanced instruments and resources: “Performing complex lung surgeries in a minimally invasive way requires a huge technology. You have to equip an entire truck with an operating room that has high-definition cameras, high-definition instruments and everything necessary for high-risk procedures.”
“A lot we will have to see it on the fly”
“We have to have another cabin make it like an Intensive Care Unit (ICU). And we have to bring nurses, an anesthetist, sanitation systems… But we are working on it and it will be safe: we have a defined plan and we are beginning to equip everything with the providers. And we will need many contacts in different parts of Africa to be able to move there with guarantees and security,” he adds.
“A lot of it,” he acknowledges, “we’ll have to watch it on the go and over time: see how we are solving it. I estimate that by the end of the year we will have the unit up and running, but that depends on many factors, some even such as licenses and permits.”
“It’s a pioneering idea. Nothing like this had ever been done”
With everything, and however self-sufficient this unit may be, González points out that in any case it will be necessary to collaborate with the local centers wherever they want to operate. “There is a need,” he says, “a system for be connected to hospitals when we arrive. The idea is to reach the hospitals where they call me to operate, intervene on these patients and then return them to the center. What we will do is set up an operating room with all the guarantees, so that we do not have to operate in facilities where we know that the materials are going to fail us.”
“It’s an exciting project, and a pioneering idea. Nothing like this had ever been done before,” stresses the surgeon.
It must also be taken into account that the patient’s profile is quite different in developed countries and in nations with fewer resources, which also determines the type of operations that are carried out. “In Europe,” González starts, “what I operate on the most is lung cancer. But when I go to Africa, there is very little of that there: they are generally inflammatory or infectious pathologies”.
“These pathologies, like streptilomas, are much more complex to operate than lung cancer. There lung cancer goes undetected, and those patients die. In the other pathologies, there is more follow-up and when they see that there is a destruction of part of the lung or of almost all of it, that is when they contact us”, he explains.
“In any case,” he goes on to explain, “we do everything with my technique, Uniportal VATS. It is operated through a tiny incision, two to three centimeters, and the patient is able to recover much faster and with less risk.”
“You have to manage the security issue”
Another question that González raises is that some of the African countries, beyond the problem of means that they pose, can at a given moment come to suppose a security problem that must be taken into account when taking the mobile unit there that the foundation seeks to create.
“There are two parts here,” he says. “One is to create unity and the other is to manage the issue of security. how we movetake the material from one country to another that is conflictive… in a truck, for example, there are cases in which it would not arrive”, he indicates.
“These people also have the right to access these surgeries”
“It is something that we still have to think about, because this is something that has never been done. But since it is such a beautiful idea, to bring minimally invasive surgery to Africa, the amount of acceptance and support that we are having is impressive, from companies , donors… Why not? These people also have the right to access these surgeries,” he concludes.