Spotlight on Dr. Abdourahmane Ndong

Dr. Abdourahmane Ndong is a visiting scholar participating in the Stanford African Scholars in Global Health Program (SASH), organized by the Center for Innovation in Global Health (CIGH). He is part of the 4^th cohort and spent six weeks on campus focusing on laparoscopic surgery training and how he might scale this work in his native Senegal.

My name is Abdourahmane NDONG, MD, MPH, PhD, FACS and I’m an assistant professor of surgery at Gaston Berger University in Senegal and a general and laparoscopic surgeon at Saint-Louis Regional Hospital in Senegal.

It’s such an honor to be a SASH scholar. This is a program, which is run by the CIGH, brings mid-career physician leaders from Africa for a six-week exchange followed by a year-long implementation project in their home country.

It has been a valuable opportunity to learn from mentors such as Dr. Sherry Wren, the Secretary of the American College of Surgeons ACS since 2022, and Dr. Cara Liebert, the Associate Chair of Education at Stanford Surgery, and to gain technical and leadership skills and exposure to world-class surgical education practices. I am keen to utilize this learning experience in an effective manner to achieve a positive impact on scaling surgical education in Senegal.

My project focuses on improving laparoscopic surgery training in Senegal through simulation, supervised clinical monitoring, and structured assessment. I also want to leverage on the experience of Stanford in medical and surgical education just like ENTRUST digital platform that has been developed, custom designed, and widely used as part of surgical education in several countries in the COSECSA region.

My preliminary findings confirm that simulation exposure significantly shortens the initial learning curve for laparoscopic tasks, with simulation training and bedside proctoring leading to faster progression to independent steps in common procedures such as appendectomy and cholecystectomy.

Despite some systemic barriers including instrument availability, maintenance, and protected time for training, I believe that these challenges can be overcome through local organization. I believe that if technical skills can be taught efficiently, then sustainable scaling of training will depend on system-level fixes such as supply chain management, training factors, and assessment processes.

Background

I completed my training in both Senegal and the UK with a focus on surgical education and public health system research. In my work, I emphasize the intersection of clinical practice, surgical education, and health system research to build safe and scalable laparoscopic training and improve surgical education through simulation, partnerships, and implementation research

In 2021, I completed a 1-year master’s program in London. I worked in the simulation center at Queen Mary University, focusing on simulation and laparoscopy. It was an eye-opening experience because it exposed me to a different context of learning in surgery. I did a lot of hands-on work at the simulation center including exposure to structured curricula, validated assessment tools, and integration of virtual reality and box trainers into progressive learning pathways. The environment reinforced the value of deliberate practice, short feedback cycles, and competency checklists, which helped translate simulation training into reliable clinical performance. My mentor was Professor Bijendra Patel, who is a close collaborator with Drs. Wren and Liebert. This experience and the exposure were very important as it has not only sharpened my training skills, but also my laparoscopic capabilities as a surgeon.

Experience @ Stanford

I have been lucky to avail myself of all the resources here at Stanford from academic to technical, including access to advanced simulation labs, the OR, and faculty.

The Goodman Surgical Simulation Center is one of the most advanced simulation labs in the United States, and it’s accredited by the American College of Surgeons. I am thrilled to have had full access to this center and attending their different sessions has very beneficial in my training.

On top of that, I had the opportunity to see the laparoscopic video simulation trainer developed through the Welcome Leap SAVE project led by Dr. Tom Weiser, and learn about its role in scaling surgical training. This platform allowed me to practice the workflow of common cases such as cholecystectomy and appendectomy. I think that this an important step that could help scale training in laparoscopic surgery where it’s most needed, particularly in low-resource settings.

In Stanford’s operating rooms, I had the opportunity to observe the most advanced surgeons and surgical teams and see how they perform surgery in a real-world setting. I also attended a variety of seminars and workshops in leadership and grant writing, all while developing a collaborative network to connect me with global surgery initiatives.

In addition to meeting leaders in Stanford’s global surgery program, and I attended the 2025 ACS Clinical Congress in Chicago where I met global surgery icons from all over the world and was sworn in as a fellow of the College.

Thanks

I’d like to express my deep gratitude to Stanford’s CIGH for the SASH opportunity and thank my two wonderful mentors, Drs. Wren and Liebert, who are always available and helped me develop my project. Thanks to the SASH team: I appreciate their commitment to sharing skills, mentoring future surgeons, and building sustainable training systems; the program is already accelerating my ability to translate surgical education into measurable improvement.

Thank you to my local team in Senegal at Gaston Berger University, Saint-Louis Regional Hospital, particularly to my mentor Professor Ibrahima Konate, the coordinator of the surgical residency program and former dean of the faculty of health sciences, who has done everything possible to make this participation happen.

My commitment is to share the skills that I’m learning widely, mentor the next generation of surgeons in Senegal and Africa in general, and to build sustainable training systems that remove barriers to safe minimally invasive surgery across the region.