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The Droitwich Knee Clinic was established in 1988 by Doctors Angus and Sheila Strover, and in 1991 they set up the charitable educational trust that is now known as The Knee Foundation. At the time this combination represented a challengingly different model to the British norm as the group was -
- owned and/or controlled by doctors
- with academia an integral part of the culture
- and always striving to lead rather than follow
The academia was undertaken via The Knee Foundation, which is a registered educational charitable trust (Charity Number 1004606), and whose mission is to:
- identify and promote best practice amongst sporting and medical professionals
- identify issues and controversies and facilitate their understanding
- facilitate pure and applied research and the dissemination of results
- facilitate the acquisition of knowledge and skills amongst professionals
- develop a patient fund to enable certain patients to benefit from our network of highly skilled professionals
The Foundation has a close working relationship with Droitwich Knee Clinic, the Knee Clinic’s Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeons and Physiotherapists act as the Foundation’s Clinical Advisory Board and three members serve on the Foundation’s executive. This reciprocal arrangement allows the clinicians intimate access to educational and research facilities and allows the Foundation team access to expert opinion and skills. Several of the Advisory Board members are well published.
Our vision for the Foundation is to develop it as an international learning resource centre. With this in mind we established from the outset a Fellowship programme to offer young doctors from around the world the opportunity to work and study in Droitwich and London. The period of study is usually six months, and the doctor receives from us a stipend to cover his living and study costs.
Over the years we have run over 1,500 academic courses, including several relatively large international courses. However, we prefer to train via small participative groups, allowing close contact with experts both from our organisation and others, as we feel that this is the best environment in which to learn.
We have over the years granted more than 40 Fellowships to doctors from India, Greece, Czech, Belgium, USA, Lebanon, Zimbabwe, Jamaica, Iran, Australia, Thailand, Venezuela, UK, South Africa, Israel, Italy, Hungary, Spain, Brazil, Egypt, Libya and Pakistan. Amongst them were four young surgeons from the same city in Venezuela, who now work there in association and themselves run training courses – so we have made a major impact in a country which had a serious need for such skills. A number of research papers have been published by the Fellows, and several presentations and poster displays have been accepted at major meetings. Most of the Fellows become knee specialists once they finish their higher surgical training.
Part of our fundraising strategy is to develop an endowment fund to ensure that the Fellowship programme will continue in perpetuity. We are also building a patient fund to help patients with unusual or complex operative treatments.
The nucleus of The Foundation’s learning resource centre is already in place:
- We have a collection of 4,500 35mm clinical slides and are in the process of converting these to digital images for use in educational projects.
- We have a similar collection of thousands of clinical videos of surgical procedures and are in the process of digitising these as well.
- We have a modest video-editing suite that allows us to produce training materials for courses and the web.
- Our library of books and journals, although small, contains the key reference materials for research.
The Knee Foundation is a unique British project. We are proud of our past efforts and look forward to continuing our unique contribution to medicine.
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