Instruct emergency medicine residents, general medical officers( equivalent to interns), and EMS students. HVO has partnered with the only teaching hospital in Bhutan and has started a new emergency medicine residency.
This will help Bhutan a small himalayan country to develop this important specialty and give. More advanced care to those suffering emergencies.
Bhutan is a small country between India, China, and Bangladesh. It is a predominantly buddhist country. It is predominately rural with one large city Thimpu. People have to travel long distances to receive care for any emergency. Through this program more physicians will be trained in emergency medicine and will be placed in the smaller towns allowing more accesability to medical care.
As above, the entire trip is set up to train local physicians in emergency medicine
Twenty bhutanese nurses at the main teaching hospital in Thimpu, Bhutan were taught ACLS and graduated from the class. Approximately 20 are certified every month with help from Health Volunteers Overseas. Also three classes of twenty emergency medicine responders (20 students per year in a 3 year program) similar to our paramedics and EMTs received training five days a week. In the pictures they are learning the safe extraction of victims of motor vehicle crashes. A new emergency medicine residency has been started in Bhutan with HVOs help. The residents, there are only four so far, received didactics every morning from 8:00-9:00. They then went to work in the wards or in the emergency department. In addition daily staffing in the emergency department offered many opportunities for bedside teaching to the EM residents as well as nurses, EMRs and general medical officers that work in the department but don’t have specialty training yet. In addition to teaching emergency medicine I had the opportunity to treat and teach the residents how to best treat patients with terminal illnesses using palliative and hospice modalities.
