With a little over a week to go, Dr. Myron Rolle is “excited” that he has achieved more than half his $200,000 goal to assist with funding his CARICOM Neurosurgical Initiative (CNI) to implement solutions to help solve the issue of neurosurgical disease across the Caribbean. As of Monday, Rolle’s GoFundMe account had raised $145,488.
“We’re very excited about the progress of the fundraising campaign for the CARICOM Neurosurgical Initiative! It shows that people – local and international – see the value in improving the access and quality of care to the most vulnerable populations,” Rolle told The Nassau Guardian.
“Since CNI has started, the response has been amazing. We’ve been approached by physicians’ groups from the Dutch Antilles and the Cayman Islands to engage in conversations around partnerships. It is encouraging to see this level of communication around an initiative that is built on collaboration and the sharing of resources [and] best practices.”
CNI is about ensuring Caribbean residents have equitable access to quality and timely neurosurgical care and include aiming to improve public policy, develop clinical practice, and build research and education capacity.
“We aim to promote government engagement and facilitate ongoing support for neurosurgery as a strategic national priority,” Rolle previously told The Nassau Guardian of the initiative scheduled for a January 2022 start.
CNI will be operated under the Caribbean Neurosurgery Foundation, Inc. and the Myron L. Rolle Foundation.
He was able to achieve more than half his fundraising goal in less than a month with donations from The Kraft Family Foundation ($50,000), Abiomed Inc. ($25,000), and Massachusetts General Hospital ($50,000), as well as the people he termed “incredible donors from all walks of life”.
It is because of other donors who donated from $20 and up that comprise the 113 donors to date that Rolle said the initiative is closer to accomplishing its goal.
“We’re almost there with our goal. The push continues,” he said.
With a little over a week left to the crowdfunding on GoFundMe, Rolle said people can continue to support the movement with their contributions to allow them to realize the remainder of the amount needed to help fund a solution to build neurosurgical capacity and improve equitable access to timely care for the most vulnerable populations in the Caribbean.
Donations can also be made at the Caribbean Neurosurgery Foundation, Inc. website at www.caribbeannf.org.
Rolle, a fourth-year neurosurgery resident at Massachusetts General Hospital, is expected to be in New Providence for eight weeks at the kickoff, managing it from the ground, followed by stints in Barbados, then Guyana.
“We aim to establish a sustainable framework for the sharing of best practices, sharing of clinical knowledge and promotion of novel modalities to treat a variety of neurosurgical diseases. We aim to facilitate collaboration in understanding the regional neurosurgical disease burden, catalyze organically produced research, and expand neurosurgical coverage through educational tools devoted to task shifting of frontline healthcare workers.”
The crowdfunding donations, Rolle said, will assist in covering visiting professorship costs (supporting the travel and logistics of visiting professors to bring their clinical research expertise to a CARICOM nation). The goal of the visiting professorship program is to share knowledge, skills, and best practices with fellow providers and students to expand the neurosurgical capacity in the region; surgical equipment costs (purchasing, implementing and maintaining new surgical equipment to allow medical staff in the Caribbean to operate without resource-related limitations); virtual neurotrauma teaching module costs (utilizing the professional virtual space to educate and train nurses around CARICOM regarding neurotrauma task shifting to expand neurosurgical coverage – especially in the more remote, vulnerable islands); production of public service announcements (PSAs) to prevent traumatic brain injury (leveraging media resources to develop, produce and air PSAs unique to each CARICOM nation to advocate for preventative measures and create awareness around the potential harm to children and adults alike); and government and major stakeholder policy meeting costs (supporting the travel and logistics of policy advocates to present and implement policy items to the government officials and major stakeholders of CARICOM nations). The goal of the policy meetings he said is to effectively address gaps in neurosurgical care further upstream, (so as to prevent catastrophic consequences); neurotrauma registry costs (collating patient data in a shared, secured place to inform clinical management and influence policy around neurosurgical disease); and CNI fund operations (administrative and operational costs).
For Rolle, the CNI is personal. His aunt, Annie Gwendolyn Smith, died in 2010, after being hit by a car and having had to wait seven hours for her head trauma to be evaluated by a neurosurgeon. By the time she was seen, he said, it was too late. His aunt died.
“My whole world had changed,” Rolle said in an online video announcing the initiative. “Someone who was so close to me, and someone who I admired so much was taken away from me, instantly. We lost a pillar, a champion, our hero and that was a really hard time for all of us. After we lost aunty, I started doing research. I wanted to know why she was forced to wait seven hours to be evaluated.”
Rolle said he realized his aunt’s death was the product of a broader, systemic problem in the Caribbean. And that the Caribbean’s geography is one of the biggest hurdles when it comes to patients getting trauma-related care due to the distance between the islands. Lack of centralization, he said, makes it impossible to treat all trauma-related cases within the recommended four-hour window.
On his GoFundMe page, Rolle said there is approximately one neurosurgeon per 600,000 people in CARICOM countries, which means, he said, that many urgent or emergent neurosurgery cases in the region will not make it to the hospital in time, or if they do, there may not be anyone there to treat them. He said these common scenarios results in permanent neurological damage or death.
“After [Aunty] passed, I couldn’t help but think that her death could have been prevented,” he said in his video. “I was not a medical professional, I was not a neurosurgeon, but I knew there was a solution, and I was committed to help finding it.”
Rolle, who at that time was still playing in the National Football League (NFL), said finding the solution started with him altering his career. He retired from the NFL in 2013, and applied to medical school with one goal in mind – to become a neurosurgeon and fix the medical disaster, and pursue his other passion, neurosurgery.
Rolle applied and was accepted into Florida State University College of Medicine and got right to work. Within four years, he graduated medical school and matched to neurosurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. At the same time, he began traveling and meeting doctors in the Caribbean, working with them to explore ways to solve the issues of neurosurgical disease.
“I wanted to make sure that no one faced the same issue my aunty had faced.”
Rolle said Caribbean islands are more than just a vacation destination and are home to around 16 million people who, right now, are served by just a handful of neurosurgeons with limited capacity – people who he believes deserve equal access to healthcare.
“My aunty was the pillar of my household and I know how hard it was for us when she passed away, especially knowing that there was a chance that she could have been saved. No one deserves to lose a family member because of a preventable death.”
The post Dr. Myron Rolle closes in on CARICOM Neurosurgical Initiative crowdfunding goal appeared first on The Nassau Guardian.
source https://thenassauguardian.com/dr-myron-rolle-closes-in-on-caricom-neurosurgical-initiative-crowdfunding-goal/
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