Julie Wynne is an Acute Care Surgeon. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona and works all over the United States as a locums tenens surgeon. She is in her first year as a student in the Graduate Certificate Global Surgical Care program.
Read on to find out more about Julie, her experiences, what led her to GCGSC, and more!
What are some of your hobbies & interests (cooking, sports, travelling, etc?) What do you love to do in your spare time?
I enjoy traveling and seeing the sights of our great world, and how people live in other countries and cultures.
Can you please tell us about your career or professional background?
I am an Acute Care Surgeon in the United States, which means that I do Emergency General Surgery, Trauma Surgery, and Surgical Critical Care. I usually work at Level I Trauma Centers in the United States, but currently am doing “locums” work, which means that I accept travel assignments to provide coverage in underserved areas.
What has inspired you to study and work in the field of global surgery? Please share any experiences you have had in global surgery work.
My parents worked in the U.S. Diplomatic Corps briefly, so I was exposed to other countries and cultures at an early age. After graduating from college, I served in the U.S. Peace Corps in Botswana. After I had completed my medical training, I began accepting assignments from Doctors without Borders, and have worked with them intermittently for 21 years. I have done assignments in Sri Lanka, Nigeria, South Sudan, Cameroon, and Ukraine.
What attracted you to the GCGSC? How do you plan to use the skills and knowledge gained from this program in your career in the future?
I learned about the UBC Global Surgery program on Twitter! It is one of the first programs to offer an educational program dedicated to Global Surgery. I wish I had done this years ago. I’m still working with Doctors Without Borders, so I hope that the knowledge gained in this program will give me insight into my work.
I understand you have been a member of U.S. Chapter of Medecins sans Frontieres in 2003, and since that time have completed seven assignments, for a total of thirteen months in the field. Can you tell us more about your experiences and what sparked your interest in volunteering?
My first assignment was at a District Hospital on the eastern Coast of Sri Lanka, in a Tamil community, about a year after the 2002 ceasefire. MSF was therefore preparing to end their commitment in Sri Lanka, but my colleagues at the hospital warned me, “This is far from over.” They were correct. Combatants used the new technology of cellphones to perform targeted assassinations throughout the town. I was not allowed to ride my bicycle to the hospital because of frequent bombings. In addition to sharing the call schedule with a Sri Lankan surgeon, I was tasked with culling through the surgical documents that had been amassed by MSF surgeons working in the 17 year life span of this MSF project. Among the papers that I found was a map of Sri Lanka indicating the location of all surgeons in Sri Lanka. The vast majority of the surgeons were located in the two largest cities, Colombo and Kandy, with very few surgeons elsewhere, similar to the distribution in my own country. This certainly came to mind during the Surgery 510 module on Surgical Workforce.
I subsequently did two brief assignments in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where MSF had established a Trauma Hospital inside an urban underserved neighborhood. The patients had largely suffered penetrating violence as a result of the disputes surrounding equitable sharing of the proceeds from the large oil deposits in the province. We also treated a lot of blunt trauma patients from car and scooter crashes in this densely populated city. Open severely comminuted tibia/fibula fractures were a very frequent injury, and challenging to treat with our available resources. I was not aware of the extent of this issue globally until I took Surgery 512.
I had three assignments in Cameroon and South Sudan, providing General Surgery in extremely austere settings. The procedures were largely laparotomies, appendectomies, burn management, and debridements of soft tissue infections, but also traumatic injuries. For my Surgery 512 class, I read a paper that stated that children born in Sub-Saharan Africa have an 85% risk of requiring surgical care by age 15, which is consistent with my experience in these areas.
My most recent assignment was in eastern Ukraine, in 2022. I was placed in a rural hospital to work alongside a Ukrainian surgeon. This location was only 25km from the frontline, so we were nightly the target of shelling, and frequently received civilian victims of shelling injuries, and sometimes Ukrainian soldiers. This was another very challenging assignment, largely related to the hospital staff’s lack of familiarity with basic trauma protocols and algorithms.
I’m heading out to another assignment in February 2025. I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in the care of people in need. I am also very happy to be participating in the educational offerings of UBC Global Surgery, and strongly recommend to others. Don’t put it off as I did!