I will be spearheading a medical mission trip to Lusaka, Zambia this May for 2 weeks with the primary focus of providing anesthesia care at the University Teaching Hospital. I have been fortunate to take this trip for the past 2 years, and I have been invited back yearly to continue our efforts. The local Zambian anesthesia residents have a lack of teaching expertise for their anesthesia residency so our group will be in Lusaka to help with their education but teaching them hands-on in the operating rooms while providing care to surgical patients. We will be focusing on how to provide safe anesthetic care despite the local resource constraints. Another major focus of our trip will be helping them become proficient in ultrasound-guided nerve blocks to help with perioperative pain. We will teach them how to perform these blocks safely and effectively since postoperative opioids are thought to be dangerous without monitoring on the wards. I will be traveling with two UCSD anesthesia residents to help ignite their passion for global health and positively impact their eduction. The support of the Dox Foundation is critical to continue these yearly mission trips given the lack of financial support at my institution.
I hope to benefit the local Zambia patients that we help take care by providing them safe anesthetic care during their surgeries. In addition, by providing education to the local anesthesia residents, we hope to positively benefit their anesthesia training. The local residency program in Lusaka is in significant need of hands-on educators in the operating rooms, so we hope to fulfill that need for our time in Lusaka.
By focusing on education to the Zambian anesthesia residents and hands-on clinical care, we hope to have a long-term impact on safe anesthesia care in Zambia. We hope the anesthesia residents will incorporate our teachings into their future careers and thus hope to positively impact perioperative care throughout Zambia.
We partook in a two-week-long mission and anesthesia educational trip to Lusaka, Zambia to teach local anesthesia residents at the capital's University Teaching Hospital. With two accompanying US anesthesia residents, we took care of patients in the operating rooms and perioperative areas at UTH. We assisted with providing safe anesthetic care and pain management for a wide number of surgeries including obstetrics, gynecology, orthopedics, urology, ENT, oncologic surgery, neurosurgery, general surgery, and plastics. While most of our teaching was hands-on in the operating rooms, we also assisted the local residency program with didactics and workshops. One of our emphases was on pain management and ultrasound-guided nerve blocks. Since systemic pain management options are limited at UTH, patients often have significant postoperative pain given lack of nursing, monitoring, and opioids. Our ultrasound-guided nerve blocks helped the local patients significantly with perioperative pain, and our efforts increased the local residents' technical abilities and confidence. We sincerely appreciate the Dox Foundation's assistance with this mission trip and honestly would not be able to continue these efforts without their assistance. We hope that our efforts with have a long-lasting effect on safe anesthetic care in Zambia. Thank you!
