Dr. Matchecane Cossa

Member of the transitional Technical Advisory Council

Matchecane Cossa received is Thoracic surgeon who received his M.D. from Eduardo Mondlane University 20 years ago, and he is a faculty at the cardiovascular and thoracic surgery service at Maputo Central Hospital. And he has been at the Ministry of health of Mozambique for the past 10 years as the Director of the National Program of Surgery with responsibilities of managing surgical workforce, medical supplies, and the development of surgical infrastructure.

He started practicing Medicine in a 100-bed rural hospital in Niassa Province (the poorest province of Mozambique), where he gained experience in hospital management as the director of this health facility during a period of 3,5 years.

Through his position at the Ministry of health, he has been involved in global surgery programs, working together with UCSD (University of California San Diego) colleagues. And thanks to this collaboration, eight (8) years ago he earned a Glocal fellowship at the University of California Global Health Institute (UCGHI), GloCal Health Fellowship program 2015-2016, measuring surgical care in Mozambique using WHO (World Health Organization) indicators for surgery. It was a national wild survey during a 6-month period.

He is also involved in research and teaching. He is a teacher at the Faculty of Medicine at Eduardo Mondlane University and a mentor for undergraduate students and residents at Maputo Central Hospital. His teaching responsibilities includes leading the first thoracic surgery training program for residents in Mozambique.

He has just earned a post-graduation degree on oncological Surgery at IPO (Portuguese institute of oncology) in Portugal.

As a general thoracic surgeon working at Maputo Central Hospital, he basically does chest surgery, from lung recessions to esophagectomy, due to infectious diseases (tuberculosis and aspergilomas) and cancer. He has a special interest in esophageal cancer surgery. Almost half of his clinical research collaboration is in this field. He is doing a PhD training in esophageal Cancer at Abel Salazar Biomedical Science Institute in Porto, Portugal. The purpose is to end this training developing a National Program to prevent and control Esophageal Cancer in Mozambique.

Recently he has been working with the Utstein metrics group on global surgery metrics. The lancet commission surgical indicators, recently updated by this Utstein group consensus is the focus of the National Program of Surgery of Mozambique. These metrics will allow us to evaluate the status of Mozambique Surgery and bring it in to National Agenda.