My name is Neil Browning and after 23 years as a consultant surgeon in the UK, I've moved with my wife to Moyo, Uganda where I am working as a volunteer surgeon in a government hospital that serves many South Sudanese refugees, as well as the local population.

The hospital staff do an outstanding job but are limited by the lack of equipment available to them. Commonly, many patients with basic fractures, especially hip fractures, end up getting inadequate treatment due to lack of equipment.

Take Arikanjelo Asobasi: he is a 68-year-old gentleman living in Moyo with his wife and four children. In August 2020 he fell, fracturing his right hip. It's the sort of injury that could easily happen to any of us, but the only treatment the hospital could offer him was skin traction. This is a basic treatment where you attach the leg to a weight at the end of the bed to try and align the two fractured ends of the bone.

Arikanjelo lay in bed in the hospital for 2 months, but the treatment has failed. He needs an operation otherwise he will struggle to walk again. This will be a tremendous burden for him and his family. He cannot work. A wheelchair is beyond the family's means.

An early operation could have changed all this for him.

My vision is to set up an essential orthopaedic surgical service to change the lives of people like Arikanjelo. I'll use the money raised to buy the following equipment so that we can treat the local community and refugees:

Fracture table: this is used to align fractures/broken bones so we can pin them properly

C Arm (X-ray machine) that can be used in theatre during operations so that we can see what were doing

A basic set of orthopaedic instruments (e.g. drills) for our surgeons to use

Please help us as a hospital to better serve the community here in Uganda.

So that we can use Gift Aid wherever possible, our local church, St. Peters Church, Chertsey (Surrey, UK), charity number 1159207, will be managing financial donations - but rest assured that every penny will go directly to the purchase of equipment for the Moyo hospital. Please note that our fundraising page started out here: https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/medical-equipment-moyo-hospital - all money raised on this page is still going to the same cause!