As VeinTrain prepares for the next phase of work with Edna Adan University Hospital, Founder Sarah Phillips has been taking time to listen properly to Dr Edna Adan Ismail, not just to the practical detail of training delivery, but to the wider context behind it: the history, the leadership and the system Dr Edna Adan has spent decades building.

That listening included a personal reflection Dr Edna Adan recently shared publicly. We're not going to debate its content here.  What it prompted, instead, was a pause: a reminder that understanding the people, history and leadership behind a partnership matters as much as the training curriculum itself.  What matters to this workforce, their leaders, and patients.

Healthcare provision and VeinTrain remains apolitical. We respect the complexity of what has happened, and what may still be happening, but our focus is healthcare, education and practical clinical capability. Whatever the wider context, healthcare must take precedence where people need safe, skilled care and you can see this managed over time by following the leadership story of Dr Edna Adan.

Dr Edna Adan has spent decades building health services, training clinicians and advocating for women's health in Somaliland (Horn of Africa), work recognised internationally through honours including the French Legion d'honneur and multiple honorary doctorates. Preparing to work in a system she has shaped for so long means paying attention to what that system actually needs, not just what training can be delivered.

For VeinTrain, that means going in asking questions rather than making assumptions: what organisational readiness looks like on the ground, what local leadership is already in place, and what “safe scale” genuinely means for a hospital and its teams, rather than treating scale as a number.

Our relationship with Edna Adan University Hospital in Hargeisa has grown this way, from an initial small cohort into a wider group of clinicians combining in-person workshops with digital learning through our HALO model. The emphasis throughout has been on practical capability and local ownership, built alongside the hospital’s own teams rather than delivered from a distance.

It is critical that these complex settings are able to lead their own way. Sometimes this is remarkable. It was very clear that we were working with highly driven and focused clinicians. As we learned more, it also made sense of the remarkable speed at which the project was able to move forward.

There was significant lateral agility in response to situational change, while still ensuring progress. This encouraged us to proceed with a faster rollout. Additionally, the acceptance of global knowledge and expertise enabled a fast pace of training uptake compared with the UK and other countries. At other times, we may find that things stall.

What became clear was that a trip out was crucial for Sarah to match the pace of the Somaliland work. Being there would allow her to understand what the system is working with on the ground: the clinical realities, the public health and complexity context, the organisational dynamics and the leadership conditions around implementation.

This is where Sarah’s wider experience matters, including TAVI pathway work, ICB-level complexity (Integrated Care Board - Integrating Health and Care - Collaborating with multiple partners) ,  living systems leadership thinking and based on Public Health and diplomacy thanks to Sir David Nabarro's generous sharing of his time and expertise.  Systems thinking and the Tavistock approach to understanding systems, relationships and change and project management in clinical care over two decades ago, again in a top quality focused highly professional organisation, much like the culture of Edna Adan Hospital and Univeristy. That perspective helps VeinTrain listen properly, read the conditions accurately and support the pace of local leadership rather than imposing an external model.

The training is the easy part.

This is why partnership and system-building matter. Simply offering a service, a one-off contract or a single training run does not work.

As that work continues, Sarah and the top team, including leads here in the UK and in Somaliland, will keep the same approach: listen first, understand the system and its priorities, then respond in a way that supports what is already being built, rather than assuming VeinTrain’s role is simply to deliver training and leave.

Dr Edna Adan’s leadership, and the platform she has built, are part of what makes that kind of partnership possible.

You can find the link here  - Fascinating and over time you can click the tag and find out more

Learn more about VeinTrain's global training work on the VeinTrain Knowledge Hub, or get in touch with our team.