1. Professor Kapur has donated £10,000 to set up an Australia-India Neuropsychology Fund, to promote collaboration between Australia and India in respect of the neuropsychological care of neurological patients in India. This scheme will cover a wide range of brain disorders, including traumatic brain injury, dementia, epilepsy, etc. At the Global Neuropsychology Congress held in Portugal in July 2024, Professor Kapur set up a meeting with leading Australian and Indian clinicians, and they all welcomed this initiative.
2. Professor Kapur is funding 5 doctors from India to attend the international NeuroTrauma conference to be held in Cambridge in September 2024. He will pay all their travel, conference and accommodation expenses. Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a major issue in India, which has one of the worst road safety records in the world. Professor Kapur has also arranged for the doctors to visit the St Mary’s Hospital TBI Unit after the conference, and to visit the Transport and Road Research Laboratory in Berkshire. After the doctors return to India, Professor Kapur will be funding their additional roles as Road Safety Ambassadors to promote road safety in India. He will fund their giving talks based on what they learned at the conference, and based on what they also learned after the two post-conference visits that he arranged.
3. For the past 10 years, Professor Kapur has been the Human Factors Advisor to the surgical safety group, CORESS (www.coress.org.uk). CORESS has recently appointed nine junior research fellows to promote surgical safety in the UK. Professor Kapur has donated two surgical safety books to each of the fellows (Oxford Handbook on Patient Safety, Surgical Metacognition) to help them in their work.
4. Professor Kapur worked for 25 years at Southampton General Hospital as Head of Neuropsychology there. As previously noted, he has set up a Nurse Amin Abdullah award scheme at the Trust, to fund projects that promote nurse wellbeing. Southampton General Hospital has one of the leading asthma research units in the UK, and Professor Kapur has recently donated £10,000 to promote clinical research in asthma at Southampton General Hospital.
5. To coincide with the launch of the second edition of his Injured Brains of Medical Minds book in October 2024, Professor Kapur is organizing a conference of international speakers on themes related to the book. This conference will hopefully take place in November 2024. As well as book royalties, all of the conference proceeds will go towards the Dr Karen Woo Fund and to the Nurse Amin Abdullah Fund that Professor Kapur has previously set up.
6. In the case of the £10,000 donation given by Professor Kapur to the Afghan Healthcare Professionals Association (AHPA) in memory of Dr Karen Woo, the AHPA will use the majority of the fund for building a ward for thalassemia patients in a Kabul hospital, and name the ward the Karen Woo Ward.
In May 2013, I made a £3000 donation to the Karen Woo Foundation, which was set up in memory of Dr Karen Woo, a UCL-trained doctor who was killed by terrorists in Afghanistan while serving the poor and needy there. The donation was accepted by Lynn Woo, Karen’s mother, in front of the Gandhi statue in Tavistock Gardens, London. I drew inspiration from the wonderful example set by Karen Woo.
In April 2013, I donated an electronic keyboard to the Jewish School for Girls in Calcutta, India. This was in memory of Shirin and Sharmin Alam, 7-year old twin girls who were pupils at the school, and who in May 2010 died in a railway disaster caused by terrorists. Their story touched my heart, and I promised that if I ever set foot in Calcutta I would make a donation in their memory. In April 2013, I happened to be in Calcutta as part of a lecture tour in India.
Illustrated below is work I have supported at the Arpana Hospital Complex in India, and more details can be found here
