A Step Back in Time

By Nathan Ramsey, MD   I traveled to Ghana, West Africa, during the fall of 2010 with the sidHARTe program (www.sidharte.org) sponsored by the Joseph L. Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University. I spent six weeks at a district hospital participating in an educational program, the goal of which was to develop a curriculum and to focus on training midlevel providers in the basics of emergency medicine. Emergency medicine is a developing specialty in Ghana. Most emergency care is provided in ill-equipped casualty units in district hospitals. The units are rarely staffed by physicians and the first-line providers are nurses and medical assistants (equivalent to physician assistants or nurse practitioners). Most of the nurses have not even been trained in the basics of emergency care.       This trip was a totally new experience for me and proved to be invaluable because its primary focus was not direct health care delivery but educating and training local practitioners. It was my first opportunity to switch modes from a resident focused on learning emergency medicine to a teacher passing on what I have learned. I was stationed in a 100-bed district hospital located in the medium-sized city of Mampong in the Ashanti region of Ghana. There was one staff physician for the entire hospital and, for the most part, I functioned independently during my time at the hospital. I worked as an attending doing daily teaching rounds as well as giving weekly lectures, l...
Source: Going Global - Category: Emergency Medicine Tags: Blog Posts Source Type: blogs