KARACHI: Pakistan faces a serious shortage of emergency healthcare professionals and there is a dire need for specialised training for the staff to handle different types of emergencies.

This was one of the key messages delivered by experts at the Aga Khan University’s two-day annual emergency medicine conference that began on Tuesday.

Titled ‘Integrating Clinical Care and Public Health in Emergency Medicine’, the conference was organised by the university’s departments of emergency medicine and continuing professional education in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University and Fogarty JHU-Pak International Collaborative Trauma and Injury Research Training Programme.

Starting off with a detailed presentation on improving patient outcomes in emergency medicine, a renowned emergency medicine expert associated with the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the US, Dr Junaid A.Razzak, stressed the need for training personnel in emergency care.

“Currently emergency medicine training programme is available only at two private hospitals and is likely to produce no more than four to six residents a year. The country, however, needs 15,000 to 30,000 emergency physicians. Just for teaching hospitals, about 5,000 emergency medicine consultants are needed today,” he said.

He said critical interventions that could help save lives that included getting the right team for the complex operations of the emergency department and engaging in pre-hospital care.

Dr Marcus Ong, an emergency physician associated with the Singapore General Hospital, highlighted the challenges in pre-hospital care in South Asia. Poor outcomes in the field, he said, were directly linked to a lack of strategic investment in the specific field, absence of clinical leadership and low public awareness.

Tracing the history of emergency medical service (the practice of medicine outside the hospital) in Singa­pore, he said the Island country started off with a hospital-based emergency medical service in 1917 and later a trauma ambulance service was started in 1928.

Dr Ong, who had done extensive research on emergency medicine in the UK and the US before developing a proposal of a world class pre-hospital emergency care system for his own country, said children in Sing­apore were trained in lifesaving techniques such as CPR (cardiopulmonary resu­citation).

“Survival rates could be increased multiple times if there is a coordinated res­ponse to a disaster,” he said in reply to a question.

At the plenary sessions, discussions were held on violence against women (VAW) and the challenges posed by infectious disease emergencies.

Dr Yasmin Zaidi from the Centre for Gender and Policy Studies, Islamabad, elaborated upon the various forms of VAW and shared with the audience findings of some relevant studies.

The absence of standardised indicators to measure VAW, she said, was a major hindrance to collecting accurate data on the scale of violence against women and that was finally done in 2014 when the United Nations set up nine indicators to measure VAW.

Published in Dawn, September 16th, 2015

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