KARACHI, June 26: A trauma manual was launched during the inaugural session of a training course which was held on Thursday night. The manual has chapters from national as well as international experts.

Speaking at the event, the director-general and chief operating officer of the Aga Khan University Hospital — Dr Nadeem Mustafa Khan — said his organization intended to hold such training courses frequently in the future. The idea was to enlarge the group of people who were properly trained in the issues in trauma management.

He expressed the hope that more people and organizations would benefit from the continuing education programmes of the hospital.

Dr Shaista Khan said mortality and morbidity arising out of trauma were avoidable. Furthermore, trauma incidents generally involved young people, that is people who were passing through productive phases of their lives.

The hospital’s head of surgery expressed her desire to see a change brought about in the country vis-a-vis trauma management. Every doctor, she said, was emotionally involved in trauma cases. This was so because during their training they had come across trauma cases in which lives were lost unnecessarily.

Dr Qamarul Huda — the course director — said trauma was one of the leading causes of death and disabilities in the world. According to the World Health Organization, he said, trauma cases were on the rise in South Asia.

He underscored the need to train local doctors in trauma management. Proper and timely treatment of trauma patients could not only reduce mortality but also morbidity.

Describing the course, he said the participants would be given both pre-and post-course tests. The certificates would be awarded only after qualifying the tests.

Dr Huda said about half the participants belonged to the hospitals other than Aga Khan University Hospital. He added that the discipline of trauma management started to be developed after some bitter experiences of a surgeon whose family met an accident in the late 1970s.

Dr Huda said trauma cases were more amenable to treatment than terminable diseases. Later, footage was shown in which some comic situations involving doctors not conversant with modern techniques of trauma management were depicted.