Global Anaesthesia Course

Global Anaesthesia Course (formerly known as Anaesthesia in Developing Countries (ADC)) is an unusual and successful course started by Dr Mike Dobson in 1981 in Oxford, in an effort to meet the specific needs of anaesthetists from the UK and similar high-income countries wishing to travel to low-resource settings to work, or to collaborate with other anaesthetists in these settings.

The provision of safe anaesthesia in low-resource settings is difficult but essential to reduce avoidable illness and death in some of the poorest places on earth. Much of this illness occurs in young people, often associated with childbirth, and a significant amount is preventable by safer and better resourced anaesthetic practice.

For this reason many anaesthetists from high income countries wish to support health care providers in LMICs in an effort to reduce the health burden in a particular place. When they do so, they encounter enormous differences between the environment in which they trained (with reliable power, sources of compressed oxygen and other gases, sophisticated machines and modern drugs) and that faced by their LMIC colleagues. The course supports informed partnership and collaboration by offering training around common contexts and challenges faced in the low-resource setting.

Over the last thirty years the course has remained popular and useful with attendees who largely come from the UK, Australia, Canada and Europe. While the course usually takes place in Uganda, in 2022 it was held in Oxford. The 2024 course was held in Uganda from the 11 to 15 November.

CPD: The 2024 course was accredited by the Royal College of Anaesthetists for 20 CPD credits

2023 Global Anaesthesia Course report

See the 2022 Anaesthesia in Developing Countries course report

BOOKING

2024 course booking closed

To be added to our mailing list for information about future courses, please email events@ndcn.ox.ac.uk and put GAC in the header.