Speaker: Professor John Buckels CBE
This talk will focus on the work of Médecins Sans Frontières, particularly in Africa where it spends around two thirds of its budget. It will start with how Africa was disadvantaged, particularly by colonisation as well as lack of food sources which delayed technical developments. It will then describe where MSF has chosen to work, the range of its activities and the challenges of working in austere environments.
John was born and brought up in Liverpool then studied medicine at the University of Birmingham. He trained in surgery and was subsequently appointed to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham as a Consultant Surgeon with a special interest in transplantation. He pioneered reduced and split liver transplants in the UK and was awarded a CBE for Services to Transplantation in 2002. As a student he worked in Nigeria in 1971, one year after the end of the Biafran War, which inspired him to work after retirement in the humanitarian field. John has done 14 missions with MSF of which 13 have been in Africa.