As physicians, we all have taken the oath of Hippocrates. We all agree that “medicine is for the people, if you go down to a purely business level, your influence is gone, the true light of your life is dimmed,” quoted from Sir William Osler.

Philanthropy is a long-lasting charitable work. It is actually the core value of a physician’s mission. It has been an honorable tradition that physicians, of their own will, are willing to provide free medical care to patients in need, especially in remote areas lacking medical resources. However, it usually took a tremendous amount of work for traditional philanthropic medical services that usually required a lot of resources, including transportation of doctors, nurses, medical equipment and medical supplies for the medical team to care patients, operate or teach the local doctors. The effects of such works are usually short and limited.

Innovative approach is possible with less cost in the modern Information and Communication Technologies era. The Urological Association of Asia (UAA) started to establish a philanthropy program in 2019. The original idea was derived from UAA previous President, Professor Ying-hao Sun who started to run the pro bono medical service in China in April 2016. The Across Asia Uro-Philanthropy Campaign (AAU-PC) was started later and a website is designed by UAA (fig. 1). The beauties of this platform are: 1) it helps urologists go to medicine-lacking areas in their neighbors, not too far away, and 2) it can provide free medical service to your patients at your hospital in that week (AAU-PC week) you provide free operation or educational lectures to patients. At the AAU-PC website (http://www.uaanet.org/aaupc/), the information of Asian urology philanthropy events in each country will be shown (fig. 2), and participating urologists can know how many events and how many participants are enrolled.

Figure 1. Site illustration of AAU-PC in Asia.

Figure 2. The front page of AAU-PC website showing the hospitals enrolled in this platform.

The UAA also encourages its members to start such philanthropy campaigns by inviting its 25 national associations of Asia to join this campaign. Normally, the AAU-PC event will be held 4 times in a year. This is not mandatory, and UAA provides guidance if any member nation has interest to start such campaigns. In these 2 years, there were more than 5,000 urologists involved in this philanthropic campaign, more than 5,022 free operations performed at 1,148 sites, 1,800 free educational lectures for nonprofessional audiences, and more than 90,000 patients have benefited from this campaign across Asia.

Unfortunately, this campaign was forced to stop due to the pandemic of COVID-19 after 2020. However, the UAA has successfully used the current information technology to establish a user-friendly platform for a philanthropic purpose. We sincerely hope this campaign can be re-opened as soon as possible when the COVID–19 pandemic is over. We also hope that this kind of attempt can spread to other continents such as South America or Africa. Considering the close relationship between the UAA and AUA, the UAA is willing to share the website platform to any urological society in the whole world, especially with the help of the AUA.