Third UT researcher to be appointed visiting professor at Hue University of Medicine and Pharmacy
On 16 June, the title of visiting professor at Hue University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Vietnam was given to Katre Maasalu, Associate Professor of orthopaedics at the University of Tartu’s Faculty of Medicine, for long–term successful international cooperation. The same title has also been given to Professor Sulev Kõks and Associate Professor Aare Märtson.
Associate Professor Maasalu and her team have consistently contributed to the development of medical education and training of medical teaching staff in Vietnam. Maasalu and her Estonian colleagues have been to Vietnam several times to educate their colleagues and doctoral students, they have instructed surgeries and the Vietnamese have job shadowed them in Tartu.
Maasalu is also the supervisor of Ho Duy Binh, who was in Tartu recently and is writing his doctoral thesis about a rare congenital brittle bone disease in cooperation with the University of Tartu.
Cooperation is bilateral. Vietnamese medical staff and students need more specialised practical studies and medical training because the people are poor and, for example, there are very few joint replacement surgeries because it is so expensive. According to Maasalu, there are nearly 1000 artificial joint replacement surgeries in Tartu alone but only 50 in a Vietnamese city with a population of one million.
Cooperation with Vietnam, which has a hundred times more people and diseases, enables Estonian researchers to do better and quicker research on the causes and treatment options of diseases and this will directly benefit the health of the Estonian people.
So far, the cooperation between researchers has been mainly in the fields of orthopaedics, pathophysiology, reproductive medicine, and stomatology. In addition to the above mentioned researchers, the Vietnamese cooperation team also includes Doctor Aivar Ehrenberg, Professor Andres Salumets, Professor Mare Saag and others.
The cooperation between UT researchers and the Vietnamese is an ambitious and extensive project which has received support from the European Union Regional Development Fund, the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research, the Ministry of the Environment, and the World Bank.