Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) and Texas Children's Hospital (TCH) have partnered with Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital Authority (KHMH) in Belize City, Belize since 2015 offering continuing medical education training to nursing and physician staffing focused on pediatric emergencies. The World Health Organization (WHO)'s Emergency Triage Assessment and Treatment (ETAT) course is a short course focused on pediatric triage and immediate stabilization. This was first implemented in Belize in 2016 with a sustainable train-the-trainer (ToT) program and, prior to COVID, nearly 400 healthcare staff had completed trainings. Given the COVID pandemic, training had been halted for the past several years due to other clinical demands and the need for social distancing. Due to staff attrition, the number of staff trained in ETAT dropped significantly during COVID.
In May 2022, we restarted this program and have trained a new cadre of trainers that has resulted in approximately 200 ETAT trainers in Belize. This fall there will be several trips to implement training in the Northern region of Belize. The goal of this trip is to train a new cadre of trainers and increase the uptake of ETAT in the Northern region of Belize.
Providing ETAT training to healthcare workers in the Northern region of Belize is expected to benefit the children in the area. The training also consists of a training the trainer portion to allow for ongoing education of healthcare workers in the region by local staff.
This is an existing partnership between TCH/BCM and KHMH that has resumed activities since May 2022. There will be ongoing contact between institutions and further trips to support the learning and reinforce as neeeded.
18 staff members from Western Regional Hospital in Belmopan, Belize received ETAT training. Nurses and physicians from the hospital participated in this 2 day WHO course reviewing the emergency triage and stabilization of critically ill children.
