LAHORE:
Irish experts will conduct courses in Emergency Medicine and Immediate Care for health professionals at University of Health Sciences (UHS) from October 22 to 27.
An 8-member delegation from the Centre for Emergency Medical Science, University College Dublin (UCD), reached at UHS on Friday. The team is led by UCD course director Prof Gerard Bury.
During their one week stay, the team will hold three workshops to develop an instructor faculty in Pakistan, a UHS spokesman said.
UHS Vice Chancellor Prof Malik Hussain Mubashir speaking with the delegation on Friday said that a patient’s immediate care was a field in medicine which needed to be standardised as most lives were lost in the first 10 ‘golden’ minutes of any emergency such as heart attacks, strokes, shock and trauma.
“In Pakistan, the importance of emergency ward is greatly under appreciated and even in the ‘best’ facilities it is merely an extension of inpatient departments rather than a specialty in itself”, Prof Mubashir said adding that emergency departments in hospitals needed to be structured along modern clinical guidelines as practiced internationally.
The project director of Institute of Learning Emergency Medicine (ILEM), Ireland, Dr Khurram Shahzad said the international visiting faculty would run workshops on “Immediate Cardiac Care and Trauma” for the emergency staff of Edhi Ambulance Services, Rescue 1122 and students and faculty of affiliated institutions of UHS.
He said the courses were designed and delivered with a hands-on approach. The participants would be encouraged to practice and demonstrate both the skills and the knowledge necessary to save lives, he said adding that the basic objective was to prevent death in emergencies.
He further said that doctors still seemed to be expected to learn resuscitation skills in the clinical settings, when there was little opportunity to correct poor technique. Once students became house officers, their time for training was limited.
“Given this situation and the fact that many junior doctors are not competent in carrying out effective cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), training in basic and advanced life support should become standardised and a mandatory component of undergraduate curriculum in medical colleges” he opined.
Dr Shahzad further said that faculties for courses such as Cardiac First Responder (CFR), Emergency First Responder (EFR) and other accredited courses were being developed in Pakistan and AJK. The ILEM faculties had so far trained about 5,000 professionals all over the country. He also said the AJK government had made these courses mandatory for all health workers in BS 1 to 19.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 22nd, 2011.
COMMENTS
Comments are moderated and generally will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive.
For more information, please see our Comments FAQ