Doctors complete ER training

May 27, 2014 News

Guyana’s capability to deal with and treat patients who require emergency medical attention at its major hospitals and health care facilities is expected to be boosted and improved. Emergency Room (ER) doctors from across Guyana wrapped up a three-day Continuing Medical Education (CME) Training Session in New Amsterdam.

Emergency doctors participating in the CME yesterday.

The group of medical practitioners benefited from lectures and educative sessions from ER specialists from Vanderbilt University Medical Centre in the USA, and from the University of the West Indies (UWI), on emergency room procedures and practices.
The CME is opened to the general public of doctors across Guyana. At least seven faculties from Vanderbilt and one from UWI performed the CME. Associate Chief-of-Staff of Vanderbilt Medical Centre, Dr. Stephan Russ, said that 14 trainee resident doctors were also part of the attendance.
Dr. Zulfikar Bux, Head of the ER at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC), speaking to Kaieteur News yesterday at the workshop, said that training for ER Physicians started way back in 2010, and is nothing really new. Annual ‘crash- courses’ in Emergency Medicine, he stated, are regularly done, and new batches of doctors benefit.
Dr. Bux added that the CMEs would help to educate the doctors “of toxicological emergencies… [snake] bites and stings, so we’re trying to deliver emergency education, because it is a new field and we are trying to deliver it in Berbice and bring our knowledge base to Berbice.”
He said that emergency medicine training needs not only to be broadcast in Georgetown; rather it should become available in all parts of the country. He praised the Berbice Regional Health Authority (BRHA) for its support along with Dr. Vishalya Sharma, Medical Superintendent of the N/A Hospital and its CEO, Alan Johnson.
“There is that support since we started this initiative…and the plan is to continue to strengthen the relationship with BRHA so we can bring emergency medicine formally maybe in a few years and have emergency medical specialist also work in the county of Berbice.”
He added that Emergency medicine is a very crucial part in any health care system, thus it encompasses the pre- hospital care, “so it’s something that has been realized in the U.S…and Guyana recently started it.” He said that it is very important since patients come to the hospitals with various differentiated issues in terms of sorting them out, diagnosing them and bringing them to the right doctors.
Dr. Bux noted that it is very important to have patients from the public “be faced with the correct doctors…and unfortunately at this point in time, we do not have enough emergency doctors in Guyana, but in due time, with these training processes and specialty programmes that we have, we will have them and once we do, then emergency care for the general public will be vastly improved.”
Strides in emergency care
The medical official said that Guyana’s main hospitals, Georgetown Public and New Amsterdam, are indeed making strides with the way they are dealing with emergency care. If a comparison is made before the training started in 2010 and now, “you will see a great development.”
“You’d go to G/T Hospital and the quality of care has increased. We have actually improved the turn- over times for patients that are really sick, picking up a lot more on diagnosis probably not picked up as early as they used to. We have delivered acute care, delivering cardiac support in the ER, doing CPR—so we are actually saving lives more now in the emergency and that’s what emergency medicine is…saving lives against time.”
The health system, he said, is always short on time when people come in very sick, “and emergency doctors are doctors who are trained to actually deliver critical care in the shortest amount of time.”
He noted, too, that improvement has also been noted at the N/A Hospital because resident doctors are going there to do rotation from time to time.
The ER at the New Amsterdam Hospital, he said, has been restructured over the past year, making it more patient- friendly, more spacious, “and at the same time, bringing more beds…and also, we’ve done triage, so patients are sorted out properly, so instead of waiting their turn, they are actually triaged according to their medical condition.”
As it is, the focus is to continue these initiatives at the national referral [tertiary] hospitals (GT & N/A), “We’ve also done Diamond [Hospital] and Linden…The idea is to start at the main hospitals; go to the regional hospitals; address those main centres, and then from there, once we have more specialists, go down the line and address the peripheral hospitals.”
Bux thanked the two foreign teams for delivering these training to the local cadre of doctors.