FACE: The Gift of a Fresh Start: Results from a Single-Center Surgical Gift Program

I didn't realize that Jane Gunn kind of started off as a missionary.

Yeah, me either.

Yeah,

so Nordhoff was actually, so it's interesting because my craniofacial nurse coordinator when I came here actually grew up there and her dad was a general surgeon who was partners with Nordhoff, who was also a general surgeon.

So when he started practice, he was like, they saw all of these like congenital conditions and burns.

And he's like, I need to get plastic surgery training.

So he left and did plastic surgery residency, then came back and started their first plastic surgery residency.

And his first two residents were Yuri Chen and Fu Chenwei.

And they like picked the best two general surgeons and like these guys like transformed the field and like invented stuff like, you know, that nobody had ever dreamed of.

And they have like a really, I think, unique setup where there was like the labor was relatively cheap.

There was high innovation.

It was like a perfectly fertile ground for developing the specialty.

And then when I went there as a visitor, it was like 50 fellows from all over the world.

And they had just like, built this incredible legacy.

So that was something like, it's always like in the back of my mind is like, this is really cool.

And I honestly like see a lot of similarities between that and some other places that are like rapidly developing plastic surgery capacity, like in Vietnam and in Rwanda, where they've like had a great alignment.

You gotta like, it has to be like perfect storm where like the government, the university, you have collaborative like international partners, but it's not like, In a sense where they're just trying to crank cases or old school mission trip type of mentality.

So really developing sustainable infrastructure.

So it's cool to see that happen in different parts of the world where those things align.

That's awesome.