Building a longitudinal curriculum that will teach emergency department providers that include house staff, medical students, nurses, and emergency medicine doctors with point of care ultrasound skills. We are emergency medicine attendings with advanced ultrasound fellowship training. The curriculum will start with pre-course work of lectures and questions. Once on site we will conduct in person hands on workshops with lectures followed by scan shifts on patients over the course of the week in the ED to demonstrate the utility and increaese comfort. There will be follow up tele- quality assurance meetings to review images and booster knowledge. Grant will be used to subsidize travel there and anything additional will be put toward buying butterfly ultrasounds or toward on site costs for running the workshop such as gel, wifi, and lunch for the participants. Initial topics will focus on machine knobology, physics of ultrasound, EFAST, Echo, RUSH Exam, first trimester obstetrics, procedural skills, and nerve blocks for pain control and procedures. Future topics will include advanced Echo, Renal, Biliary, Eye, Head & Neck, MSK, Bowel, and DVT of upper and lower extremity.
Ghanaian Medical Providers including house staff, medical students, nurses, and emergency medicine attendings. We want to support these learners and providers with a skill that they can use in their resource poor environment. We also want to create a process of testing retention and providing feedback to provide sustainability. These are the providers who are on the front line encountering the sickest patients including trauma, pediatrics, obstetrical, and critical medical patients.
Our goal is to ensure providers know how to incorporate ultrasound into their everyday clinical practice and feel confident making clinical decisions on their ultrasound scans. Ultrasound is extremely portable and cheap compared to other imaging modalities such as xray, ct and MRI. It does require time to build baseline knowledge of how to use it, how to incorprate into practice, and feeling confident with hands on skills and interpretation. By making sure we are part of the continued learning process pre and post workshops, we hope to help maintain these confidence levels for the long term and teach the skills to then propagate the skills further for future rotating practitioners in the ED with a teach the teacher program. We plan to have quarterly Ultrasound conference / QA where we can review previous scans and do CME through review of old topics as well as more advanced topics.
We had the opportunity to educate in point of care ultrasound 30+ physicians and nurses from the Tamale Teaching Hospital in Ghana. They have very few resources for diagnosis and often are limited on what the families can afford to pay for services. We held lectures on a range of topics in point of care ultrasound from physics and knobology to echo and thoracic ultrasound and hands on practice sessions with models as well as on the wards. We will be doing continued education with monthly zoom quality assurance reviews and lectures for the rest of the year. Thank you so much for supporting our project and the physicians and patients at Tamale Teaching Hospital.
