An amazing trip to Uganda with GECC and representing UC Davis. There were two overarching goals for this trip: first to instruct junior, senior and qualified emergency care providers (ECPs) in Uganda on POCUS and push forward GECC’s mission to improve emergency care. Second to assess the sites and establish relationships at emergency care sites to build a global ultrasound fellowship at UC Davis. The latter will serve to create a sustainable model to provide ongoing training and educaiton in Uganda (and other sites) while providing training to our global ultrasound fellow.
The educational piece went well, but there were several challenges unique to delivering education in a global setting with unique cultural and educational differences. ECPs are chief complaint focused and have little background in anatomy, physiology, pathology. How could they when they have 2 years of nurisng training after secondary school and then enter the ECP program (another 2 years)? Their level of training makes complete sense in their unique environment and they are doing a fantastic job improving emergency care for the region. We have to adapt our educational model to fit their needs. They will need a bit more background information and they responded much better to chief complaint based clinical cases, interaction, game based education, and short lectures. I need to design constant methods for assessment, as they often will not volunteer when they are confused about a topic. Also, I need more sonographic assessments geared towards tropical infectious diseases. For better or worse, ultrasound was often the primary diagnostic tool avaiable. Our future fellow and I have our work cut out for us. I plan to build a global section on this site that will contian unique material geared towards low resource settings. Would love some collaboration here if anyone is interested.
SonoStuff 