Newswise — Michael W. Brennan, MD, the American Academy of Ophthalmology's international envoy, is headed to Basra, Iraq this week to keep alive a three-year effort to rebuild the medical community there, despite the increasing chaos.
Dr. Brennan has traveled to Iraq the last three years to help Iraqi physicians organize a national medical society that can improve healthcare for their patients and develop educational and training resources for physicians.
Why travel to a city the Pentagon has listed as one of five cities outside Baghdad where violence remains "significant"?
"I'm going there for the doctors and patients," said Dr. Brennan, who practices in Burlington, N.C. "I have friends there now and I can't back out on those friendships. I owe them."
He will be accompanied this week by plastic surgeon Bernard "Bud" Alpert of the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, who has also made several trips to Iraq, and two Iraqi physicians from the United Kingdom, pediatrician Majeed Jawad, MD, and obstetrician Ali Kubba, MD.
Though this trip will be short (Dr. Brennan will be back at his practice on Monday, March 5), it will be long enough for him to continue building on these friendships, while at the same time developing the Academy's mission: sharing educational resources with individual ophthalmologists worldwide to improve patient care.
Although the area has become more dangerous, Dr. Brennan continues to return to Iraq because his work is desperately needed and wanted. Dr. Brennan said that war, economic embargo and dictatorship have deprived Iraq's health care system of modern medical advances for 20 years. As a result, many physicians have simply left Iraq.
The Brookings Institution's Iraq Index, which tracks variables of reconstruction and security in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, estimated that about 12,000 of the country's 34,000 physicians have left the country since the 2003 invasion. It also estimated that another 2,000 have been murdered since 2003.
Still, Dr. Brennan found physicians there to be talented and eager to rebuild their healthcare system with some help from physicians abroad. Dr. Brennan said he and the Iraqi physicians are hopeful that their efforts will stem the tide of emigrating physicians. It's a huge project, but as Dr. Brennan said, "you have to start somewhere."
Dr. Brennan's starting point was in 2004 when he helped organize the first international medical conference held in Iraq in more than two decades, the Iraqi Medical Specialty Forum.
He signed onto the project at the request of his former West Point classmate, Army Surgeon General James Peake, MD. Dr. Brennan left his practice in North Carolina and spent two months visiting Iraqi hospitals " in Kurdistan, Mosul, Babylon, Al Hillah and nearly all major hospitals in Baghdad " to encourage physicians to participate in the forum. They also recruited 30 physicians from the United States and the United Kingdom to attend the forum.
Despite a bomb threat which required a change of venue from Baghdad's Medical City complex to a convention center within the Green Zone, the conference drew hundreds of physicians, eager to update their knowledge.
A number of ventures and friendships were sparked by the trip, including the creation of the Medical Alliance for Iraq, an independent, unincorporated volunteer organization, which Dr. Brennan now serves as the chairman.
When the increasing violence prevented their return to Baghdad, they headed for the safer northern region of Erbil to organize another leadership forum, this one dedicated to the establishment of a national system of regional continuing medical education (CME) centers. More than 100 Iraqi physicians turned out for this forum.
The effort was so welcomed that physicians in Basra requested Dr. Brennan and the Medical Alliance for Iraq organize a similar program for physicians in southern Iraq. He couldn't refuse. So, once again, he's on his way to Iraq.
"I'm looking forward to this trip," said Dr. Brennan. "I'm eager to see how we can help."
About the American Academy of Ophthalmology
The American Academy of Ophthalmology is the world's largest association of eye physicians and surgeons—Eye M.D.s—with more than 27,000 members worldwide. Eye health care is provided by the three "O's" " opticians, optometrists and ophthalmologists. It is the ophthalmologist, or Eye M.D., who can treat it all: eye diseases and injuries, and perform eye surgery. To find an Eye M.D. in your area, visit the Academy's Web site at http://www.aao.org.
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