Mersey School of Anaesthesia makes pioneering five-year funding award to help train doctors in Nepal
/The Mersey School of Anaesthesia (MSA) has announced a five-year funding donation for the first time – to benefit doctors helping Nepal recover from the devastating earthquakes.
Dr Shambhu Acharya (left) with Dr Tushar Dixit
The £5,000 donation to Health Exchange Nepal (HEXN), a UK-based charity, will pay for training programmes for anaesthetists in the Himalayan country.
Nepal’s infrastructure was badly damaged by an earthquake measuring 8.1 on the Richter Scale in 2015, which caused the deaths of 9,000 people and injured more than 20,000 others, with a massive impact on the country’s health system.
Dr Shambhu Acharya of HEXN, who also works as an anaesthetist at Aintree University Hospital, welcomed the donation from the MSA, the first of its kind which the organisation has made.
Dr Acharya said: “This extremely generous support will enable us to provide additional education and training for doctors in Nepal. It will make a tremendous difference to the care which they can offer their patients.
“Knowing that we have an ongoing funding stream from the MSA enables us to plan well ahead, which is very good news indeed. We are incredibly grateful to the MSA.”
Dr Tushar Dixit, Associate Director of MSA and Consultant Anaesthetist at St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospital said “MSA has supported many educational activities related to Anaesthesia within Merseyside for many years. For the first time, MSA is able to provide continuous financial support to improve education and training of doctors in anaesthesiology in Nepal and support HEXN in their commendable work. We feel very fortunate to be associated with HEXN in this noble cause of nation re-building.