Building on a current partnership we have with a team of pediatric acute care doctors in Santo Domingo, DR, we hope to host an in-person workshop to teach point of care ultrasound (pocus) guided central lines. This will kick off a large hospital-wide QI initiative to improve safety and decrease adverse outcomes in critically ill patients. Most importantly, the workshop and project are directed by DR based clinicians who know exactly what their patients need and what our expertise can add in person to their workshop.
We will be teaching emergency medicine, surgery, and critical care physicians who work at a large tertiary care children’s hospital in Santa Domingo. Therefore, the children who will benefit from this the most will be those who are critically ill and/or injured and referred to this hospital to receive care from the excellent physicians we will train in this life saving skill.
This is the next phase in a long term bidirectional partnership aimed at improving POCUS capacity at a children’s hospital that serves a large number of critically ill and injured children. The need for POCUS guided central lines was identified as a significant need by clinicians there, so we anticipate that this trip will build on prior work we’ve done to increase POCUS use generally while also filling a specific gap in procedural ability for these providers. Our prior work has demonstrated that when we do in person, hands on training sessions we see increases in POCUS use, emergence of local leaders, and increased POCUS teaching by those who participated in our workshops. Therefore we expect this will be a sustainable effort that will directly benefit the children in the DR, and we plan to partner with leaders in the DR to measure the effects of this intervention.
Thank you for helping make this trip possible! We were able to hold 2 days worth of workshops (including lectures, hands on practice, and clinical application to real ICU patients) to a large group of pediatric ICU, emergency medicine, anesthesia, surgery, and pulmonologists. This was an idea born from our local champions to help increase the capacity of their doctors and the safety of their patients undergoing procedures, so the enthusiasm from the participants was great. We anticipate that this will directly benefit both the providers who care for sick and injured patients as well as the patients themselves, who now will receive a higher quality of care as their doctors are equipped with the skills to use ultrasound to guide procedures like central line placement.
