At UCL Institute of Healthcare Engineering, global health is a core priority area. We are committed to maintaining a truly global outlook through shared learning, and we have embedded this focus within our governance structure through the creation of a dedicated Global Delivery Group.
This global approach offers exciting potential to explore how the kind of digital and engineering technologies that we are developing at UCL could be applied effectively in low-resource settings. Collaboration with our international partners is an essential part of this, allowing us to understand what the real challenges are on the ground and what is needed to make these technologies translatable and usable.
Our researchers are already involved in a staggering amount of global activity, across diverse regions and international settings (explore the global case-studies on our website to delve deeper), but together we can do more.
Over the next year, we want to strengthen and grow existing activity in global healthcare technologies and also deliver in new areas of impact, supporting UCL's 2034 principal theme 'delivering global impact'.
Our symposium
Collaboration and interdisciplinarity is essential to help us achieve our aim of increased global impact. There is a great wealth of global healthcare engineering research happening in pockets of excellence across UCL. We want to encourage even more connections across these areas and find ways for researchers with similar ideas or regional experiences to share their learnings.
Partnering with UCL Institute of Global Health, UCL IRDR Centre for Digital Public Health in Emergencies (dPHE) and Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences (WEISS), we hosted the first UCL Global Healthcare Engineering Symposium on 8 July 2019.
The symposium was a way to bring together researchers in global health and healthcare technologies to share their experiences, opportunities and challenges. The day provided a springboard for our efforts to identify, support and strengthen the community at UCL around global healthcare technologies.
The day also provided an opportunity to highlight and further develop our partnership with India around affordable technologies, with a delegation from All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi and Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) visiting us.
The day included case-studies of global healthcare engineering research at UCL, talks from international speakers, and workshop sessions which took a deeper dive into the unique practical challenges and funding landscape facing global projects. We ended the afternoon with an overview of the funding landscape and advice from representatives from EPSRC and MRC.
Finally, we finished up with networking drinks and prize-giving from our global health image competition. The day's full agenda can be accessed here.
The symposium was only the start of our efforts to bring together UCL's global healthcare engineering community.
Spearheaded through our Global Delivery Group, which is chaired by Dr Ifat Yasin (UCL Computer Science), we will be significantly growing our global activity over the following year. We welcome your ideas and your involvement in this community, and would encourage you to reach out to us at healthcare-eng@ucl.ac.uk with any thoughts.
Our Research & Development Manager, Marilyn Aviles, is also on hand to provide support and guidance for any collaborations arising from the symposium or related research ideas. She is contactable at marilyn.aviles@ucl.ac.uk.
Our partnerships with India
A particular focus during the symposium was our partnership with India, including talks and demonstrations by a visiting delegation from All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi and Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI). They are both centres of excellence in frugal innovation and offer incredible potential for collaboration.
Their visit to UCL kicked off with the symposium on 8 July, but included many more fruitful discussions and meetings over the following days. A notable highlight was a tour of the surgical robotics and nanotechnology laboratories at Wellcome / EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences (WEISS) which allowed researchers to demonstrate how some of the technologies being developed could be put into action clinically.
Their trip builds on a visit that we made in April to Delhi, India to advance our work around affordable technologies. To learn more about this visit and some of the background to our partnership, please read our report.
Our undergraduate exchange
Through our partnership with AIIMS we have also begun an undergraduate exchange programme, with our first five visitors finishing a week-long stay at UCL at the Global Healthcare Engineering Symposium.
The students took part in UCL Medical Image Computing Summer School (MedICSS) during 1-5 July. The school allowed these young scientists to engage with experts at UCL in a diverse range of image computing topics, fostering new links of collaboration, critical thinking and scientific discovery.
Amol Sood and Ashank Khaitan (pictured) said, "As clinicians, we are not frequently exposed to the engineering process that goes behind developing the technology that we often use in the clinics. So it was an enriching experience to listen to the talks by pioneers in the field of medical image computing, and to interact with such an array of engineers and physicists".
A UCL-wide partnership
Our developing partnership with the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi and other Indian institutions is part of the growth of a wider UCL-India relationship.
We're very grateful for the ongoing support of Prof Michael Arthur (UCL President and Provost), Prof David Lomas (UCL Vice-Provost Health) and Prof Monica Lakhanpaul (Pro-Vice-Provost South Asia) in developing this relationship. Prof Arthur and Prof Lakhanpaul are pictured here with some our visiting delegation and other colleagues from within our Institute of Healthcare Engineering and the UCL Global Engagement Office.
Over the upcoming months we will continue to expand our affordable technologies work with AIIMS, and have some exciting ideas planned for future collaborative projects, workshops and student exchanges.