BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
Fri, 31 Jan 2025
Are you interested in building an academic niche within global surgery? Dr. Catherine deVries, Professor of Urology and Global Surgery at the University of Utah and founder of International Volunteers in Urology (IVUMed), shares her journey and provides a blueprint for the aspiring academic surgeon. This episode is hosted by Dr. Suzette Sutherland in collaboration with the Society of Women in Urology. --- This podcast is supported by: Boston Scientific UroAdvance http://bostonscientific.com/uroadvance --- SYNPOSIS The episode focuses on Dr. deVries experiences as a groundbreaking woman in the historically male-dominated field of urology. Dr. deVries delves into her landmark contributions to global health, particularly through her work leading IVUMed. She shares her experiences developing sustainable surgical care programs and her academic journey. The conversation also touches on the importance of ethics and public health when conducting surgical missions. The discussion serves as an inspiration for future generations in the field of urology and global health. --- TIMESTAMPS 00:00 - Introduction 02:17 - Dr. DeVries' Academic and Professional Journey 04:08 - Experiences as a Woman in Urology 14:55 - Pediatric Urology and Global Health 21:54 - Founding IVUMed 40:34 - Future Directions 44:14 - Conclusion --- RESOURCES Boston Scientific https://www.bostonscientific.com/en-US/medical-specialties/urology/products.html Society of Women in Urology https://swiu.org/home.aspx
This week on the Backtable Podcast.
The team approach is a good idea, but actually when you are the one responsible for your outcomes from the beginning to the end, it puts a whole new light on patient care. And I think that's valuable. It also helps you to become a more independent surgeon because you're able to work and set up a case so that you can do that with a tech and pretty much any tech anywhere.
And you can travel around the world and surgery has its own language, but you can
work with people who don't speak your language because if you know how to set up a procedure and how to work with people who have some experience you can work with anybody pretty much anywhere and I do think that that is a value that many people who go into academics don't experience especially if they go directly from their training.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Backtable, your source for all things urology.
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Now, back to the show.
I'm your host again today, Dr. Suzette Sutherland, and I'm so very excited to host this very special episode. It's part of a Society of Women in Urology legacy series where we're highlighting women who've really been true pioneers and trailblazers in the area of urology. So I'm super excited to be the one to host Dr. Catherine DeVries, who's here with me today. Thanks, Catherine, for being here.
Oh, thank you, Suzette. Very good to be with you. Let me tell you a little bit about Dr. DeVries. She has spent the bulk of her academic career as professor of urology at the University of Utah, where she was the founding director of the Center for Global Surgery. That's really her passion is global health.
And she really is one of the foremost experts in global surgery and thought of in that role by many, many prominent people in many countries around the globe. Her main interest is developing sustainable global surgery. And that's what she's been working on all of these years.
Many people have heard about this organization called International Volunteers in Urology, and she is the founding member of that. Many people have heard about this organization called International Volunteers in Urology, or commonly known as IVU Med. And Catherine DeVries is the founder of this organization, which was started in 1994.
And many people who've had some experience with it know it's really blossomed into this wonderful organization that has programs in over 20 countries around the world. Dr. DeVries also has quite the academic pedigree, I would say. Her undergraduate was done at Harvard.
She had graduate school, master's in pathology at Duke, then her MD degree and urology residency at Stanford, then went on for a Peds Urology Fellowship at UC San Diego, and even executive leadership in academic medicine program at Drexel University. So she really has quite the pedigree and has done wonderful things in the area of global surgery, as well as in pediatric urology.
And again, a trailblazer for many other women. I'd like to just get started if we can and just dive in to what your experience was like as a woman starting in urology. Because certainly, you know, when you were going through the training, there weren't many people at all that are women in urology today. you know, about 10% of the urological workforce is women.
And about 25% of our trainees right now are women, which is wonderful. It means one fourth of people being trained in urology. So it's really growing. But, you know, when you were going through this process, You were probably the only one. Is that correct?
Well, I was the only one during my training. There had been one previous. That would be Linda Shortliffe. And Linda had trained also at Stanford, and she remained on the faculty. But amazingly, I never met her. During the time that I was training, because she was at the VA, and then she was off doing her fellowship in pediatric urology, and by the time she came back, I had finished.
So even though we had both trained in urology there, we never were in the same place at the same time. So it's kind of strange to realize that. But then there wasn't another one until Martha Terrace came. And that was after I had finished my chief residency. But Martha and I have stayed in touch. And she's now the chairman of urology at the Medical College of Georgia, Augusta University.
So it's really hard to say that you had any role models to emulate, to look at that you worked with, right? You really were pretty much on your own, an island among men. That is true.
Although in the year that I finished medical school, half of the incoming interns were women. In surgery. So in the various specialties. So it really didn't seem at that time to be all that strange. At Stanford coming in, we had women in plastic surgery. I think there was one in neurosurgery and several in general surgery, possibly not in orthopedics.
But at any rate, it did not feel like it was particularly groundbreaking while I was in medical school. It was only once I got into urology and I looked around and there was nobody there that it seemed a little, it's not exactly lonely because there were plenty of guys and I was so busy I didn't have time to think about that. But in terms of mentorship, there really wasn't any.
I mean, not from women. Was there anyone in particular that took you under their wing and just sort of made sure that you were visible in the process? Or do you feel like you really were just alone?
Well, it was a very small program, so it was hard to be alone. There were only two residents per year. So it was a long trip in a small boat, in a canoe, really, because we all knew each other very, very well. But there were not many women, and the first time I really met other women was five years into my training when I went to the basic science course.
And there, there were women from Baylor, women in Washington. You know, I met several women, other women trainees, and I was amazed that some programs actually had two trainees. or three in the pipeline.
So yeah, if you don't mind saying what year was that, that then you graduated from residency?
I finished in 1990. Okay.
So you're the late 80s. You were going through a residency.
Yes. And at that time, I was also raising two kids. So I was married and had two kids. And my husband was a resident in pediatrics and then anesthesia. So we were busy, very busy.
Yeah, well, I was going to bring that up. That was my next thing to talk about, you know, this combination. We always talk about balancing, right, our life's responsibilities when we're in a career such as medicine and surgery, and how do we balance that effectively with our family responsibilities and not wanting to give up one for the other, but try to make them both work.
You had a very circuitous journey, so to speak, right, to get to where you are and to get to the University of Utah. I wonder if you might share that a little bit, what some of those hardships for you were that were unique to you that even more so than the average woman.
Well, you know, when I was looking at residency, it was before we had hours limits. So when we were on call, we were on call until the next day and somebody else was on call. And sometimes that was every other night. And very often that meant staying in the hospital all night. So looking at work-life balance or work-family balance, there really wasn't any such thing because my husband then, Dana,
was also on call in the hospital. So we had to have live-in help during that time. And we planned it this way because I started my residency a little older because I'd been in graduate school. And so I started when I was 30. And looking out at that time, there didn't seem to be other options. You either had your kids before residency or after residency.
And fertility medicine wasn't what it is now. I mean, I know residents and fellows who are women who are freezing their eggs because they want to have children sooner or later. They may not have a partner, they may want to get through their training, and they want to know that it's a possibility in the future. For us, it seemed like you either had them before or hoped it all worked out later.
So we decided, my chairman at the time, Dr. Stamey, made it quite clear. In fact, he asked me during the interview whether I intended to have children, and I had to make it clear that no, I did not.
Oh, boy. You know, the big question that's not allowed anymore, of course.
Yes. But then, you know, the next woman to come along in the residency, Martha Terrace, did have kids during her residency. And by that time, Dr. Stamey had actually changed his tune on that. And he really celebrated having kids. So, you know, even... Some of the old guys and chairman changed their opinions about it. But when I was coming through, it definitely wasn't a thing.
And so when my male co-residents' kids got sick and if they took a day off, you know, they were heroes for doing this. This was really a wonderful thing that they'd go home and help their wives. But if my kids got sick, well, I should have thought about that before I got into surgery in the first place. and made provisions. So that was the double standard. It was not easy.
And my kids would have attested to that. But then when I was chief resident, then my husband, Dana, died. So everything changed.
Yeah, so then your course, again, took a little bit of a different course. You had to make some choices and decisions about what was right for your family, but allow you still to further your career. Can you talk a little bit about that? What choices did you make? And that added to your experience here. You didn't just jump right into academic medicine, right? That wasn't a possibility.
But, you know, although it was a circuitous route, you still came back, right?
Yeah, you know, I wasn't quite sure. what I wanted to do at that point. But I did have a job at Kaiser. And Kaiser was really a very good place to work at that time. I at least had control of the hours. So that was a very good thing. I would know when I was working and when I'd be off. That was a novelty. So now even more important as a single mother, right? Yes, that was a good thing.
You know, I could drive the kids to school sometimes. You know, that was a whole new experience for me. And the other thing about it that was good about Kaiser was that there was no cherry picking of cases. So I got everything my partners got in terms of oncology, women's pelvic floor, pediatric urology, we got the full spectrum.
That was back sort of in the era where there were true general urologists. And at Kaiser at that time, we were. And so I would one day be doing a radical prostatectomy and the next day, posterior urethral valves. That was the way it was. And the other thing is we didn't have residents or trainees.
And so we mostly scrubbed with techs and sometimes with a partner if it was a really challenging case.
But correct me if I'm wrong, you were again, if not the only woman in the minority, right? In the urology department at Kaiser. I don't recall if you said you were the only. So that must have had its challenges, too.
There was one other who was at a nearby Kaiser. Jackie Newman was also she had trained in Chicago. And she was up at another Kaiser north of me and we became friends. So it was very nice to have somebody else in the neighborhood.
Some other form of support. Yeah. And so you were at Kaiser then doing this general urology, of course, for about four years or so. And then you went on for your pediatric fellowship, if I remember the course. And what inspired you then to go on and do a fellowship? Here you are.
single mom two young kids in a very demanding profession and you decide and probably making decent money at Kaiser it's a great life there but you really had some inspiration that you you still needed to do something more right
I think what did it was that I had by that time started working internationally. When I had been at Stanford, one of my professors, Don Laub, who founded Interplast, currently it's called Research, had invited me to go do hypospadias surgery. And we started in Honduras and subsequently in Vietnam and Cuba. But even though I thought I was well-trained, I was a little insecure.
I wasn't sure I was doing the surgery as well as I possibly could be doing the surgery. And I didn't think you could do everything in urology equally well. In other words, I couldn't do stones and oncology and pediatric and everything else equally well.
And I felt sort of insecure about that, especially since I was going to teach some of these practices in places where admittedly my experience was greater than most of the people I was working with. And yet, I wanted to be an expert, and I wanted to feel secure in that. So I went to San Diego to do the fellowship.
And was that two years, one year, two year, three?
I think it was the only one year fellowship at the time, but that was fine with me because I was already board certified. I had already been working on my own. In fact, back in that time, they could bill for me, you know, because I could run my own clinic and I was already licensed in the state of California. So as a fellow, In fact, I think I did get a faculty appointment.
Now I think all that's changed. But at the time, it was really great to see that not only had I not been doing it badly before, but I learned some new tricks, as one always does. And I felt a lot more confident having spent that time. The other thing is that as pediatric urology was defining itself as a specialty, in order to more or less join the club, you had to have done a fellowship.
Everybody had to do a fellowship. And if you didn't, you were one of those general urologists who liked doing pediatric urology, but you weren't, you couldn't really call yourself a pediatric urologist in that way. It was kind of an exclusive club.
So it sounds like, too, that your desire then to do the pediatric urology just really came out of the need that you saw because of your passion with this global health, your introduction to the global health. And what I find so interesting is that I think oftentimes trainees especially think, If I want an academic career, I need to be so focused and I need to just stay the given path.
And you're an example that didn't stay the given path for a variety of reasons. You needed to get off the path and then found yourself back on. But it's extremely doable and gave you valuable life experiences and urological experiences that certainly probably enhanced who you are, right? Right.
And I really do feel that it's a good thing to have a broad experience, to have experience working on one's own, to get out of academics, even if we're coming back, to be the one responsible. You know, the team approach is a good idea, but actually when you are the one responsible for your outcomes from the beginning to the end, it puts a whole new light on patient care.
And I think that's valuable. And it also helps you to become a more independent surgeon because you're able to work and set up a case so that you can do that with a tech and pretty much any tech anywhere.
and you can travel around the world and surgery has its own language but you can work with people who don't speak your language because if you know how to set up a procedure and how to work with people who have some experience, you can work with anybody pretty much anywhere.
And I do think that that is a value that many people who go into academics don't experience, especially if they go directly from their training.
Yeah, and I would absolutely agree with that, most definitely. So after your pediatric fellowship, though, you didn't go straight to Utah. You took another little route and you were in Augusta, Georgia for a while. Perhaps you can talk about that a little bit, what happened in Augusta and then how you ended up actually in Utah for the bulk of your academic career.
Yeah, so I went to Augusta. Actually, this is a bit of my personality situation. There were some opportunities where I could have gone to be somebody's junior partner. I did want to set up my own program, and Augusta, they needed a pediatric urologist there. So at that time, then I was also the only female urologist on the faculty.
And also, I was on call 24-7 for five years because I was the only pediatric urologist there. And so that was a very good experience in surgical terms. I also had, for the first couple of years, a 5-8 appointment to the VA hospital. So I still took care of adults. And, you know, I like taking care of adults.
I was, during that time, also working with colleagues from the CDC doing reconstructive urology on adults with lymphatic filariasis. which is a terrible condition, also known as elephantiasis. But many people will have seen pictures in textbooks about how men can get terrible scrotal, big hydroseals, and in addition, also leg edema.
And in certain parts of the world, it is a terrible, terrible condition. And so I worked a lot with the CDC to develop standards for that, also with WHO. And so with reconstructive urologists, before reconstructive urology became its own thing. There were just a few people who were really doing it a lot, kind of well-known for it.
Jerry Jordan and Jack McAninch were some of the big guys at that time. And I learned a lot from them when I was doing more than just the pediatrics, but the reconstruction for the adults.
And that's actually where, though you also founded IVU Med, it got its start right in Augusta, Georgia. But you quickly learned that was a difficult place to start that kind of an organization. And how did you find then Utah and recognize that that was the right place to start this global health initiative?
Yeah, I looked around at a lot of different places and oddly, one of the reasons why Utah looked so good was the airport. So if you are working in a big city and it takes you an hour to get from where you live and work into the airport,
And at that time, we had to take all the equipment we were going to be using because in many places you couldn't be sure that the suction would work, the cautery would work, even the anesthesia medications would be available. So we had to take everything in great big plastic boxes and we'd take them all over the planet. And so it matters how you can get all of these things through customs.
And so having a nice small airport where you can get to know the customs people coming in and going out. The trip into the airport was pretty easy. You can go east to Asia or west to Africa or south, which is a little more hard because you had to go through Houston or someplace to get down to South America. But Salt Lake had a wonderful airport.
And beyond that, it also had a wonderful children's hospital. And, you know, Primary Children's Hospital is a fantastic, really wonderful place to work. And Salt Lake itself has a very international community. The population there has a lot of experience doing LDS missions. And so many, many people have been to a lot of different countries.
And this was not... The work I was doing wasn't seen as a hobby so much as a part of life that's accepted, respected, and also we could do fundraising.
So if you're starting... You know, for the listeners, the LDS, Latter-day Saints, right? Yes. And I think... You know, people who are not in the know, myself included, until I was enlightened by you. You know, I think of Utah as being much more conservative and not so international.
And so that was really an interesting perspective to recognize that with the LDS Church and their requirements for mission trips, that there is this huge kind of international as well as service mindset, which was, yeah, interesting.
Yeah, it was something that I had not really experienced in any city or community. I grew up in California, but in other places it's seen as a nice thing to do, but certainly not a thing that would be part of your life and career. And nobody ever questioned that in Utah. In fact, that was part of the terms of my employment. I told them that I could come, but that I would be traveling quite a bit.
Pat Cartwright, who is a pediatric urologist in Utah, had been working with me already in Honduras and Vietnam and Cuba. So I knew that Pat understood what we were doing and Ultimately, pretty nearly all members of the faculty of the University of Utah have been on IVU trips, and some of them have served on the board.
And so this has been very much a piece of the Utah academic experience, in addition to the nonprofit experience. outside experience. So it's sometimes hard to marry academics with nonprofits. They have different calendars, time schedules, and requirements for work.
So, I mean, and that's a wonderful tribute to you. I mean, you started that and today yet it is still, it's a part of who the University of Utah is. And so that's really wonderful. But Catherine, even at that time, think being a woman and starting all of this, right? You were the only woman, I believe, in the urology department and maybe even the only woman in
Utah that was a urologist at the time I think you had mentioned maybe there was one other in private practice but so again you were really a unicorn out there right and then starting this other different kind of program yes it was a bit of a struggle at first to some of my male colleagues couldn't really see why I was doing all of this stuff when I could probably get married and go home
So what do you think, you know, as you look back, do you think that there were certainly we know what the hardships, you know, we've already spoken about some and as women in urology, too, we see that what these hardships are about, you know, being a woman in urology. But. Do you think that there are any advantages for you along the way?
What kind of things that gave you maybe an edge that allowed you to be successful or contributed to your success? Not allowed you, but contributed.
You know, it's hard to know exactly about contributing to the success part. I think persistence contributes to success, whether you're a man or a woman. And I was persistent. I guess I still am kind of persistent. But I think also it is a little different voice. I think we bring to conversations a little different voice and a little different set of values and experience.
Not to say that one or the other is bad, but I'm glad that we have a better mix and balance of voices. Now at the university, we have a... I think five or six women faculty members. We just all took a photo recently at my retirement, and so it was great fun to see how many of them. But I think as an advantage goes, when I could get heard and sometimes I couldn't get my voice heard.
Then it stood out. The problem sometimes is just getting heard. And I experienced this interestingly more at the American Urological Association than I did with my own university in terms of male colleagues and getting heard. That took a little longer.
Let's jump into the details a little bit more of your global health efforts, what you have done and what you're doing even today. But you let the listeners know, Catherine's written numerous things on global health, but she's also an author of a book called Global Surgery and Public Health, A New Paradigm. You did that in combination with a general surgeon who also does a lot of mission work. And
What's different about that book than other books that are out there is it really brought up the idea about the global health crisis in the sense of, you know, we need to be giving ethical global health. Right. It really focused on that. And what are the needs abroad or in these communities and how can we.
help to not only provide those needs, but ensure that those needs are sustainably met, right? And so why don't you speak a little bit more about that? You know, it's this idea about medical missions and what do people call that? Yes, sometimes it's called parachute medicine. There you go.
But, you know, doing a one off mission trip and pat yourself on the back versus really being involved in global health and trying to help a community to build itself into a sustainable community. You know.
I discovered early on when I was traveling around, and as I mentioned before, we used to take everything when we would go. We would bring our own instruments, we'd bring our own equipment, cautery machines, anesthesia machines, really everything to make sure that we had what we needed in order to do the surgery that we were intending to teach and to do.
ivu has always been an educational organization we started that out to be an educational organization the motto was teach one reach many but it wasn't specifically just to do surgery and go home because that can always lead it leave a trail of disaster or maybe not disaster but if you even have one or two complications and you haven't worked with somebody else
locally to manage that and to know what to do, you haven't really helped. In fact, you can hurt and undermine the whole effort. So we have sought and intended to work with people who have wanted us to be there to teach them. So there's no point in my mind going into somebody else's
hospital home community and to work with the patients that they care for every day without respecting their position in that community and to work with them to help them provide better care for their patients. And as we do that inside hospitals, you start to learn about hospital systems.
And I think this is a thing that we rarely learn in medical school here in the States or probably anywhere else is how the system works. How do hospitals work? How are the nurses hired? It matters because the nurses are very often hired on a different system than the doctors are. So if all the nurses go on strike as a surgeon, you're toast. You can't do your work. You need to understand
how the place functions, the nurses, the doctors, the people who order the equipment and supplies, the whole system, including where the electricity comes from. Because if you're in the middle of operating and the whole room goes dark and you have no idea when the electricity is going to come back on, this was before everybody had cell phones and could just turn them on. You're toast. So
It's important to know how the whole system works and that gets into the public health part of it because public health is critical for surgery to occur. We have to have clean water. We have to have sterile process. We have to know that infectious disease is addressed and that we have not just a sterile processing of the instruments, but we learned during Ebola
that we have to have a public health approach to how the hospital runs. You know, you cannot share the bathrooms. The staff can't share bathrooms with sick patients. Otherwise, all of your staff will get Ebola too. You know, you have to have ways to sequester disease from not disease, how that's done in hospitals and how surgical surgery fits into that, especially
In low-resource countries where hospitals are very much built on old colonial styles, sometimes these are very old hospitals that were built by the former colonies, whether that was England, France, Portugal, pick your colony. They all had certain ways that they built hospitals at that time. And then the newer hospitals are sometimes built on Russian models or on American models.
where there are maybe no windows in the OR, which might be okay if you had really reliable electricity. But if you don't, then when it goes out, you're in the dark. That's where the public health part comes in, is looking at the systems, both the community systems, and that includes infrastructure, but also the baseline health status of a community.
I mean, if the kids are all undernourished, you're not going to get good outcomes. Similarly, as we all know with the fistula community, if we don't have good maternal care and we don't have good training, then you have all of these secondary problems for obstetric fistulas and that sort of thing.
So it's true for all aspects of surgery, whether it's trauma care, whether it's urological care or anything else you plan to do. you do need to be aware of public health. And public health people almost never go into an OR.
So the book, getting back to your question, was an attempt to introduce surgery to the public health community as well as to introduce public health concepts to the surgical community.
Yeah, so to make sure that they're communicating and working together. I wish it were more successful even now.
Yeah.
But so, I mean, that just brings home such a big point that having a lens towards public health, if you're interested in doing some global health work or going on medical missions, many times, you know, people who want to initiate a program, they go the first time. And just see what's there. Right. They don't do surgery. They don't plan to, you know, do all the sexy stuff. Right.
It's just I need to go and see what is it that you have, what you don't have and what do you really need. And then what's culturally important. going to be doable. Sometimes the culture of the country can get in the way, right? For what you might think is the right thing to do, we with our Western ideals, but they have very different cultural ideas sometimes.
I'm sure that's been difficult to maneuver, especially when you think about working with kids.
Interestingly, you know, I wouldn't have guessed it, but the when we were first working in Honduras, there were opposing camps in San Pedro Sula in the journalism community. And not everybody was all that enthusiastic about Americans coming in, even though we were working very much with our Honduran colleagues. And there were newspapers that were
printing that the Americans were coming and experimenting on the little boys in Honduras. And then, so that was not every newspaper. There was the opposing newspaper, which printed a more favorable and accurate view of what we were doing. But there are, depending on where we're working, always going to be some factions that are either anti-American.
IVU, for example, is an international organization. Not everybody who volunteers and works is American. There are people from... All of the countries where we have started working now are volunteers themselves and work. So it's not always welcomed by all members of a community. But by and large, we've had very good reception.
And I would say that all these things change when it's your family member or your child and you want the best care. And you realize that there is something to be learned from a visiting team that will improve the quality of care for everyone that does change people's minds.
Yeah. So I know you've written a lot since you wrote this book, but just to focus on this book again, because it was something that really changed people's views into looking at global health and what really was important for the foundational aspects before going on mission trips. But you wrote this 15 years ago.
If you were to write another sequel to this book, what do you think are the important things? Maybe what progress we've made thus far or what the unique challenges that we have now in 2025?
You know, funny you should mention that because one of my colleagues here in Utah, we were having dinner just two nights ago and he is just finishing his master's in public health. He's a trauma surgeon. And he said, well, how about we do another edition of this? He's getting his master's at the London School of Public Health and so he wants to carry this forward.
I think we've learned a lot with, yeah, with the COVID epidemic it focused a lot of people on what surgery and the surgical environment has to offer. both in terms of respiratory health, the systems for ventilation, a lot of hospitals and recovery rooms and ICUs were taken over. People saw the insides and the guts of what's in a hospital and what hospitals have to offer.
for public health in a pandemic. We also ran out of masks in many places and people took for granted that masks weren't necessary for hospitals, but possibly not anywhere else. And then all of a sudden there was a shortage of masks.
And now I think much of the public and certainly most of the medical community is more aware of the integration of surgical services, including ICUs, recovery rooms, anesthesia, and all of the principles that are needed to have safe surgery with good outcomes are also needed for certain pandemics.
And I think this is more incentive for people to understand how we integrate and that we're not two completely separate, diametrically opposed areas of healthcare.
Yeah, that's good. And tell us a little bit about what you're doing now, you personally, in the area of global health. You're still very active and moving things along.
Yeah, well, I just got back from Zimbabwe. So I was there for the COSEXA meeting. COSEXA is the College of Surgeons of East, Central, and Southern Africa. Getting back to pediatric urology, In many other countries, in fact, most of Sub-Saharan Africa, pediatric urology is done mostly by pediatric surgeons, mostly by urologists. And so the training is, there's a gap in training, I would say.
The pediatric surgeons don't have as much experience with scopes as we do in urology. but they have a lot of experience with newborns and newborn physiology and managing sick babies, especially sick babies in their low-resource countries. Urologists, on the other hand, have experience with stones, and as it turns out, stones are getting much more prevalent in kids than they ever were.
And so, scopes of all sorts. nephroscopes, cystoscopes, all the scopes we use are not familiar to most pediatric surgeons. And there really aren't any training programs at all in that region, in the eastern region, actually, or the west. And so newly, this is very exciting for me.
The West African College of Surgeons, as well as the East, Central, and Southern region, are starting to recognize that they need to build in their own training centers. It's been wonderful that IVU and other nonprofits have been going for many years to these places. But it's not sufficient. I mean, they really need to train their own, and we can help support that in good ways.
So we put on the first ever course. It was really well attended. It was a multidisciplinary course, and it spanned not just...
pediatric urology, but transitional urology to adulthood, because God willing, all of these kids will become adults, and they will transition through adolescence, but they still have problems they were born with, and they'll have to navigate adulthood, and sexuality, and for some of them, motherhood or paternity. These are problems that adult urologists deal with.
The people who care for them as babies need to look forward to them as adults and plan forward. And so now we're starting to integrate these communities and this I think is really the most exciting and most fun thing. I mean, I had a terrific time. I came home from Zimbabwe, you know, kind of walking on air because there are now a critical number of people
in the region who are trained, who are interested in training, and who I think are going to carry this forward so I can retire and hang out at the cattle ranch here in Wyoming.
Well, that is really amazing. I mean, as you mentioned a little bit earlier on that you retired from the University of Utah, and here you are in your retirement and still just as active as you were before. And I imagine you will remain that way. You've planted so many seeds over the years and really watched these things grow. And that's really your legacy.
It's really wonderful to see that in the area of humanitarian global health. Yeah I just want to thank you again for being our guest and just we're so excited to do this Society of Women in Urology legacy series and of course you were an obvious choice to start this off as you've touched just innumerable lives not only other women in medicine and urology but also men as well.
But then, of course, in the area of global health and your impact certainly will forever be sustainable. So thank you. Thank you so much. Well, that wraps up for today for Backtable Urology. Again, thanks so much, everyone, for listening. Until next time.
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