Point of care ultrasound (POCUS) is a medical imaging tool and skill used to diagnose patients quickly and more accurately. POCUs can also be used to guide procedures and assist doctors in directly visualizing their equipment under ultrasound guidance. We are partnering with pediatric subspecialist trainees in the Dominican Republic to teach point of care ultrasound and develop a system for quality assurance after educational interventions. Pediatric critical care, emergency, pulmonology, surgical and anesthesia trainees are interested in gaining more hands-on experience with POCUS so we are planning an educational conference that focuses on small group teaching sessions. We will also review scans they have performed and review the quality of their scans, giving them direct feedback on the POCUS skills they have learned thus far. This is part of a larger effort to initial virtual and in person quality assurance program for POCUS. We will teach POCUS topics such as cardiac, lung and abdominal POCUS in a large lecture setting and break into small groups using ultrasound machines for hands-on workshop practice. We will also use simulation models to teach and practice using POCUS to guide peripheral and central intravenous catheter placement.
The hospital we will partner with is the largest children's hospital in the Dominican Republic. Children who are treated at this hospital including Dominican and Haitian population, will benefit from this education as their doctors will be equipped with new skills to help care for them. In addition, the doctors who we train will ultimately graduate from their residencies and fellowships and will carry their new POCUS skills with them to their future hospital positions, likely throughout the country, thus further amplifying the effects of our educational interventions. Lastly, pediatricians from surrounding Dominican Hospitals are also invited to our conference and will bring their skills back to their respective hospitals and pediatric Dominican patient populations who will directly benefit.
Our expected impact is to directly teach approximately 30 to 40 Dominican physicians over a 2 day in-person conference as outlined above. After we return, we will continue to teach POCUS to our learner group from afar via virtual lectures, virtual POCUS discussion threads and an online platform designed to allow for feedback on POCUS scans and quality assurance. We also anticipate that our Dominican partners will participate in bidirectional educational initiatives with our respective American hospitals, sharing POCUS cases that can help educate all.
We taught point of care ultrasound to approximately 30 Dominican pediatricians from all across the city of Santo Domingo, with doctors from eight hospitals represented. Our efforts will affect pediatric patients cared for by these physicians as learning point of care ultrasounds helps doctors take better care of patients. It allows them to do things like guide procedures, such as central lines and peripheral IVs, instead of doing these procedures based on anatomy alone, which can vary from patient to patient. The patients cared for by these doctors range from ages 0 to 18 and come from all across the Dominican Republic and Haiti for care. We focused our education on pediatric critical care, pediatric surgery, and pediatric emergency medicine fellows, who, after graduation will spread out across the country in their respective attending positions and will bring their knowledge of point of care ultrasound with them. Through these efforts, we hope to spread the skill across the entire country, which is now the clinical standard of care for many procedures and indications worldwide. In addition, we were able to liaison closely with leadership at the local hospital to strategize about expanding points of care, ultrasound to multiple divisions within the hospital. We hope that our host hospital
will continue to progress as the leader in pediatric point of care ultrasound in the Dominican Republic. This trip allowed us to make important in-person connections and have meetings with Hospital leadership to advance this mission. It also enabled us to perform an in person check-in on the ultrasound equipment that has been donated to the hospital previously. This progress would not be possible without the support of the Doximity foundation- thank you
