From Silesia to the Emirates.
Dr. Rafik Abu Samra graduated as a Doctor of Medicine from the Medical University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland, in 1993, and chose his specialty before he chose his surname. By 1997 he was a certified general surgeon. By 2003 he was a certified cardiac surgeon — and that same year, while most of his peers were learning to harvest a left internal thoracic artery by hand, he was at the Medical University of Leipzig in Germany, performing thirteen coronary bypass procedures with one of the world's first surgical robots, the ZEUS.
Eight years on the table at Silesia, nine more as a consultant, two years at the American Heart of Poland, and a PhD in 2011 on minimally invasive and robotic-assisted cardiac surgery — and he was ready to leave Europe.
He moved to the United Arab Emirates as Senior Consultant Cardiac Surgeon and Head of the Department of Cardiac Surgery at Al Qassimi Hospital in Sharjah. There, he established the country's first robotic-assisted cardiac surgery unit, performed its first procedure, and trained the team that runs it today.
"In a country that imports its specialists, Dr. Rafik went the other way."
He now leads cardiac surgery at Dr. Sulaiman Al Habib Hospital in Dubai Healthcare City, with consulting clinics at Clemenceau Medical Center and American Hospital Dubai. Eight thousand cardiac surgeries on, 1,700 of them robotic, he is one of the most experienced robotic cardiac surgeons in the region — and still operating six days a week.