KARACHI, Oct 31: The Pakistan Medical and Dental Council (PMDC) has almost compiled a set of recommendations put forward by its Postgraduate Medical Education Committee on how to develop skills of doctors coming from different medical institutions. The council will soon hold a debate and accord its approval to the recommendations.
This was stated by President of the MPDC Prof Sibtul Hasnain Syed while speaking as chief guest at a reception hosted by the council for the foreign experts in advanced trauma life support technologies here on Tuesday night.
Prof Syed said that the approval to the recommendations would help reduce the burden on the College of Physicians and Surgeons Pakistan (CPSP) which was, at present, providing over 90 per cent specialised medical experts to the country. Elaborating, he said many more postgraduate medical institutions functioning in all parts of the country would be guided, monitored and regulated by the PMDC to train an even larger number of postgraduates.
The CPSP has introduced an advanced trauma life support programme (ATLS) in the country in collaboration with the American College of Surgeons, USA. Lauding the services being rendered by the CPSP towards the promotion of higher medical education, Prof Syed said that the credit of whatever he had achieved mainly went to the CPSP, which had churned best out of him and thousands of specialists in the medical field.
About the trauma life support training, the PMDC chief said that the training imparted to medical professionals and the relevant staff in a country like Pakistan was of great importance. “We all learn the science and art of healing the sick and the suffering humanity. ATLS programmes trains us to take better care of the trauma victims and, therefore, this art must be learnt to handle such cases artistically,” he noted.
Prof Zafar Ullah Chaudhry, President of the CPSP, said that the workshops like the one on trauma life support helped train doctors and medical professionals in making proper use of relevant techniques.
“In a situation where we have an industry marked with the absence of the laws ensuring protection to workers and employees of a country which itself sits on the fault zone and has already suffered one of the worst earthquakes in the world a couple of years back, such training courses bear special importance,” he observed. He was of the view that doctors having been trained in this field could be more helpful in saving trauma victims in an organised manner.
Dr Chaudhry noted that the CPSP was the only accredited institution among the SAARC countries to have arranged the programme. With every passing day and ever expanding volume of vehicular traffic on roads, trauma had become a disease and vehicles its vector, he remarked.
Christoph Kaufmann, a professor of surgery and chairman of the ATLS International, told the audience that CPSP was the most suited institution to deliver the programme.
He described the training programme as a “volunteer programme” launched by doctors to learn the art of saving lives of trauma victims.
He said that that ATLS was developed by a doctor in America whose own family had become victim of an air crash in 1980, dropped injured in the fields in the US. The doctor, he added, could not get prompt and proper assistance to save lives of his family members.
So far the ACS has developed eight editions of the programme revising it after every four years. The programme has helped save millions of victims in the US and over 50 countries of the world.
Prof Jameel Ali of the Surgery faculty at University of Toronto, Canada, Prof John Kortbeek, Chairman of the Department of Surgery, Calgery University, Dr Subash Gautam, Director of ATLS, UAE, and Will Chapleau, Manager ATLS Programme from American College of Surgeons, Chicago, also spoke on the occasion.