Creating hope through humanitarian care: The Norman Rowe Lecture 2025
21 July 2025 (Last updated: 21 Jul 2025 08:53)
The prestigious Norman Rowe lecture that closed the 2025 BAOMS Annual Scientific Meeting was delivered by Dr Gary Parker, Chief Medical Officer Emeritus and OMF Surgeon, Mercy Ships. He spoke passionately about his experiences working with patients who would not otherwise have access to surgery, emphasising the human need for hope.
He said: “It is an undeniable fact that all human beings need hope, [...] hope plays an essential role in the good that we can do for others. Hope fuels our strategy for getting through the day, and it inspires us as we plan for the future. The need for hope is universal. It is about shifting what people believe is possible, but to do that, it needs to be credible, it needs to be made tangible. And for many surgical patients across the world, this simply is not the case now.”
Mercy Ships deploys surgical ships to ports in sub-Saharan Africa, delivering hope in the form of vital free healthcare to people in need. Globally around two in three people do not have access to safe, timely, affordable surgery. In Sub-Saharan Africa, where Mercy Ships has focused for almost 40 years, healthcare either does not exist or is unaffordable for the vast majority of the population.
Dr Gary is originally from California and completed his training at UCLA before working at the Glan Clwyd Hospital in North Wales. It was here that he learned about the Mercy Ships and originally volunteered for three months in 1986. Since then, he has lived and worked on the ships for nearly 40 years, performing surgery and training other surgeons. He also met his wife and together they raised their family onboard.
During the lecture, he spoke passionately about his experiences working with patients who would not otherwise have access to surgery. He says: “I’ve worked as a surgeon on the ship, principally in sub Saharan Africa, and I’ve witnessed how compassionate surgery joined with human resilience restores lives and rekindles dignity. This is the essence of hope and healing at the heart of Mercy Ships.”
The audience were transfixed as he spoke about patients with maxillary and mandibular tumours, who without surgery would die from suffocation or starvation. Dr Gary showed impactful photos of the severity of the challenges presented by enormous benign tumours that are left to grow without medical help.
Surgery performed on the Mercy Ships by Dr Gary and others who offer their time has a life-changing impact on the patients they help. He spoke of a professional football player with a tumour that caused him to lose half of his body weight and left him with a dangerously low haemoglobin level, who responded well to surgery on the ship. He showed photos of cleft surgery performed by local surgeons who he trained and mentored. Dr. Gary also shared that he has learned much from them about how to work in low-resource settings.
He concluded by sharing the story of a 35-year-old woman with a nine year history of a maxillary ameloblastoma, who walked for miles to get to the hospital ship despite significant weight loss and low haemoglobin. She had been told by her neighbours that there was no hope that she could be helped. But with surgery and bone graft reconstruction, hope became tangible for her, and when she returned to her village, hope became tangible for her neighbours as well.
Dr Gary says: “In 2025 there are no good reasons why our fellow human beings are dying from benign surgical disease. There are reasons, but there are no good reasons. What can we do as OMF surgeons in the Global Surgical Arena? In many ways the same things we do at home, but adjusted for a low resourced health care system: Serve our patients with safe, timely surgical care and train and mentor the next generation of OMF surgeons.”
He concludes: “For hope to be credible for the future, it needs to be tangible in the present. It needs to be stitched with skill, shaped with compassion and delivered through systems that last. So let's train. Let's partner. Let's build. Because when we rebuild faces, we restore hope, and people begin to believe that change is possible.”
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