Australia’s Critical Care Research Group (CCRG) has announced a new partnership with Rome’s Bambino Gesù Women’s and Children’s Hospital and Cairo’s Human Fraternity Foundation.
The partnership aims to support mothers, babies, and pregnant women in Egypt by building a new hospital and training clinicians. This healthcare institution will be the first to be funded by the Church in Egypt.
The partnership will also involve CCRG hosting Egyptian Research Fellows on two-year placements in Australia, a project that is fully-funded by The Holy See. This tri-party agreement is believed to be a world first.
CCRG founder and director, Professor John Fraser, said that the group’s key tenet was “to grow and develop the next generation of clinician scientists”. He added that the new agreement with the Vatican and Human Fraternity Foundation would allow them to learn and grow together, with patients being the beneficiaries of such a union.
Professor Fraser had spent time with the world-renowned Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub at his hospital in Aswan, Egypt in 2019. Speaking about his experience in Aswan, Professor Fraser said, “the possibility of being able to collaborate and assist even a little to this wonderful country is such an honour.”
Dr Matteo Di Nardo, a paediatric anesthesiologist and intensivist at the Ospedale Pediatrico Bambino Gesù (Baby Jesus Paediatric Hospital), was involved in securing the Holy See’s support for the project. After four years in the making, the agreement was signed in Kraków last week.
The partnership secures a hospital in Cairo’s “New Administrative Capital,” and will serve approximately five million people.
The Egyptian Research Fellows will learn from CCRG’s world leading critical care research and biomedical engineering, in their purpose-built laboratories.
This includes the largest preclinical intensive care unit in the Southern Hemisphere.
