We plan to teach point of care ultrasound (POCUS) to pediatric acute care providers in the largest children's hospital in the Dominican Republic. We have donated ultrasound equipment to our Dominican partners over the last 3 years and have been teaching them how to perform ultrasound directly at the bedside of their patients to improve the rapid diagnosis and treatment of acutely ill children. Now, we will focus on quality improvement in our teaching conference. We will review POCUS images performed by our Dominican learners and give feedback to improve the quality of their scans. We will also teach POCUS in small groups with hands-on equipment, practice performing ultrasound scans on each other and on donated models. Lastly, we will review didactic based POCUS lectures covering topics such as cardiac, lung, ocular, abdominal POCUS.
The children of Haiti and Dominican Republic served by the largest public children's hospital in the country and the physicians who serve this population will benefit from our efforts in POCUS education and POCUS program development. Our focus is on providers who care for children who are being treated in the emergency department, pediatric intensive care unit and in the operating rooms. These acutely ill children are most likely to gain benefit from being cared for by a physician with the equipment and skills to perform POCUS as part of their care. They often suffer from life threatening illnesses where time to diagnosis can make the difference in survival. POCUS brings rapid diagnosis and imaging technology to patients who otherwise might not have access to imaging. Without POCUS, physicians are often left to care for these children, in the moment, blindly without any medical imaging. For example, they must place central venous catheters with only the use of anatomic landmarks. With POCUS, they can place these same catheters using direct visualization of their needle under ultrasound guidance, which has proven to improve success rates and minimize complications. The children treated here will benefit from continued development of a POCUS program in their acute care settings.
We are using a train-the-trainer model in our POCUS program development. We are teaching trainee physicians who will then graduate from their fellowships and go on to be leaders in POCUS in their new roles as attendings. For example, one of the trainees that previously attended our conferences and has now graduated, will be returning to help teach at our POCUS conference in November.
We taught an amazing POCUS conference at Hospital Infantil Robert Reid Cabral thanks to Doximity!
We taught 33 pediatricians from 5 different Dominican hospitals- all pediatricians with specialties including emergency medicine, intensive care, pulmonology and surgery. We had 5 visiting lecturers and POCUS experts from Medical College of Wisconsin, CHOP and Yale. Highlights included:
-Dominican POCUS expertise from local physicians Drs. Almonte, Mota, Estrella and Burgos!
-MCW emergency medicine chief resident, Dr Kristen Parks, lectured for the first time and was a star
-PIV extraordinaire and PICU fellow Dr Edison Rodriguez placed an ultrasound guided PIV in the PICU, sparing his patient a central line
-A fabulous case on use of POCUS to assess cerebral blood flow presented by Hospital Marcelino Velez POCUS fellow Dra Facelys Perez
We are excited for continued partnership and initiating virtual Quality Assurance to continue advancing the POCUS program at Robert Reid Cabral
The Dominican physicians that were trained during our conference will go on to use their new skills in POCUS to diagnose and treat patients more quickly all across the country. They, in turn, will be able to teach other trainees the skills and lessons they learned. Our educational programming, made possible by Doximity, will provide life saving care to children across the country. With POCUS, doctors will be able to provide more accurate diagnosis and faster care to sick children for years to come. Thank you for your support!
