The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh is delighted to congratulate Garreth and Nicola Wood on their award of MBE’s in the Kings Birthdays Honours list. Garreth and Nicola are the co-founders of the Edinburgh-based charity, Kids Operating Room (Kids OR) which recently celebrated the opening of their 100th paediatric operating theatre in Africa. We are delighted to see this great charity being recognised through the award of national honours to its founders.
Kids OR has installed paediatric operating theatres in a wide range of low resource countries across the world including those in East and West Africa, South and Central America and Asia, including Afghanistan. They have supported our sister surgical colleges in East (COSECSA) and West (WACS) Africa thereby complementing our global surgery initiatives ( Global Care) in these areas and have collaborated with our sister College in Dublin (RCSI) to deliver an online paediatric surgery e-learning programme across Africa.
Their investment in training and scholarships and also their contributions to surgical infrastructure has been extremely impressive resulting in 670,000 operations being performed in their facilities by local teams. Their impact on child health globally and surgical aspects of children’s care in particular, has been of the highest possible order. We are delighted to offer them our congratulations.