EQUIPMENT SUPPLY Dave Tipping
Dave Tipping, director of Global Operations at Kids Operating Room, is responsible for turning successful applications into delivered projects. He has worked with KidsOR since its first project in 2018, and has been central to the successful installation of over 25 paediatric operating rooms. By the end of this year, Dave Tipping, and his dedicated team based at KidsOR’s Centre for Global Operations in Dundee, will go on to deliver a further 30 operating rooms in low- and middle-income countries.
Born in Dundee, he now lives happily in rural Perthshire with his wife, Susie, and their two sons, Isaac and Oscar. When not at home or travelling the world delivering projects, he is a keen musician, and can be seen regularly playing bass guitar around the pubs in Dundee. He graduated from DJCAD with a BSc and BArch in Architecture. Before KidsOR, he worked for 10 years at a top Scottish architectural firm, taking a particular interest in healthcare design, before moving into the third sector as director of Projects for a national children’s charity, where he was responsible for delivering national and international projects to improve healthcare provision for children.
experience of surgery as whole – something that will come as no surprise to anyone who has encountered the often cold, torch-lit operating rooms, with crumbling ceilings and broken tiles, that are typical in our partner hospitals. More broadly when it comes sourcing and delivering, we must be conscious of local supply chains. Much of the surgical equipment uses disposable parts and requires consumables, so we need to make sure that there is a native market for anything provided. There’s a real danger within international development, and particularly global health, of NGOs and other actors providing items that quickly become redundant. We’ve found that the key to avoiding what have been termed 'equipment graveyards', which can be found all over Africa, is treating our partner hospitals like clients. From the beginning, we’re devoted to understanding their needs within their own operational context.
‘Infrastructure catalysts’
In this way, we are really just infrastructure catalysts. We undertake the consultations, design the ORs, provide the equipment, fund the scholarships, and carry out the initial training, all free of charge. Ultimately, however, it is our ‘clients’ – the hospitals and the surgeons – that we want to take ownership of this equipment. After three years of support, we hand everything over to them to take complete control of. That’s why it must match their requirements from the start. Some of these requirements can be small, e.g. ensuring that all instruction manuals, user guides, and other documents, are in the languages used locally, while others can be large, e.g. ensuring that there are biomedical engineering and calibration experts who can service any tools and machinery. All of this work is only possible through the support of our partners and donors. To date, we are fortunate to count the likes of Johnson and Johnson, The Scottish
Government, and Smile Train, as key supporters (not to mention countless generous individuals). Access to healthcare is a basic human right, and surgery is an indivisible, indispensable part of any sustainable healthcare system. We believe in a world where every child has equal access to safe surgery, and we won’t stop until we are no longer needed. You, reading this now, could be key to bringing about that vision. Independently, alongside your network, or through your business, you might have the know-how, the resources, or the connections, to help transform global paediatric surgery. Get in touch; the KidsOR team would be delighted to speak with you.
Reference 1 Bickler S, Rode H. Surgical services for children in developing countries. Bull World Health Organ 2002; 80 (10): 829-35 [
https://apps.who.int/iris/ handle/10665/71558].
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info@pplengserv.co.uk September 2021 Health Estate Journal 55
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