​Emergency Medicine is a vast field, encompassing a knowledge base of essentially every other discipline in medicine and a wide array of procedural skills; practitioners need to constantly stay up to date. This can be a daunting task and one that requires significant support to be achievable. To support our graduates after they finish their two-year Emergency Care Practitioner training, we are launching the Continuing Education & Leadership (exCEL) Program. The exCEL Program will provide graduates with continuing medical education opportunities to review higher level content, learn new s ..read more

"I realized that by spending a few extra minutes evaluating this patient with bedside ultrasound, Alfunsi may have saved this man’s arm." By Dr. Leigha Winters, GEC Volunteer Reposted with permission from SONOSTUFF: Education and entertainment for the ultrasound enthusiast ​Having traveled and worked in under-resourced settings before, I thought I had some idea of the type of clinical situations I would be encountering while teaching in Masaka, Uganda with Global Emergency Care (GEC). However, during my three weeks at the Masaka Regional Referral Hospital, I was continually amazed by the ..read more

"Here in our ultrasound images, we had been able to identify the root cause of his problem with no other test." by Dr. Lori Stoltz, GEC Ultrasound Director Going through all of the cases of patients that I saw with the ECPs at Masaka during my last trip, one case stood out for having so many beautiful ultrasound images. The ECPs were called to help with a foley placement on the wards. The intern physician had tried and had been unable to place the foley and so had asked the ECPs to try. Deus was the ECP trainer in charge that day and he brought along ..read more

By: Dr. Lori Stoltz, GEC Ultrasound Director ​The eFAST exam is the most widely adopted ultrasound examination for use in the emergency department. This exam looks at six locations on the body and can identify blood in the abdomen, blood around the heart, and a collapsed lung. It take two minutes to perform. In the United States it is routinely done immediately after the initial evaluation of a patient who has had trauma, such as a car accident or other injury. The ECPs have learned this exam and with very little else available to them for imaging in ..read more

"Within one day, I’d seen the training and careful preparation in the morning and practical application of the same knowledge in the afternoon. ​A great day of Global Emergency Care at work." By: Dr. Michael Schick, GEC Ultrasound Director As a second year Emergency Care Practitioner (ECP), Friday mornings are spent learning through simulation. On my recent trip to Uganda one of the morning simulations was a mass casualty event. In the simulation, a pregnant mother with her two children were riding on a boda when it crashed. Four patients, two with life threatening emergencies and t ..read more

"As our primary diagnostic tool, ultrasound can provide a fabulous amount of confirmatory and ancillary information." By: Dr. Michael Schick, Director of Ultrasound While working in the emergency department at Nyakibale Hospital in Rukingiri, Uganda a two-year-old boy arrives with his mother for persistent vomiting. He appears ill, has an elevated heart rate, but no obvious fever. Gastrointestinal illnesses are extremely common in this region of the world and account for a large proportion of childhood deaths, related to dehydration. While most children presenting with vomiting, will ..read more

By: Dr. Michael Schick, GEC Ultrasound Director At Masaka Hospital in Uganda our Emergency Care Practitioners (ECPs) have acquired specialized emergency training in point-of-care ultrasound. In this specific diagnostic skill set, they are the most trained practitioners in the region. While teaching our ECPs ultrasound we often take to the medical wards, where pathology is plentiful. There we also interact with the ward medical/surgical teams, and often our “practice” scans drastically change management. When we arrived on the medical ward we immediately find a young man tripodding on ..read more

"ECPs can be trained in 2 years, whereas it would take nearly a decade and a much greater cost to train physicians to do the same tasks. Patients dying in Uganda do not have time to wait." ​Over the past 15 years I've worked in a variety of global health settings around the world; what GEC has been doing over the past 10 years is certainly unique. Recognizing the huge physician shortage in Uganda and throughout Africa, GEC is training nurses and clinical officers to provide quality emergency care appropriate to the settings where they practice. The students are trained as ECPs. In ..read more

By: Lori Stolz, MD, GEC Ultrasound Director & Alexa Sabedra, MD, GEC Volunteer ​ On our first day in Masaka, while sitting in on the chest pain lecture being given to the ECP 1s, Deus (an ECP 2 who was working in the ED at the time) quietly walked in and asked if Dr. Lori could bring the ultrasound to the ED.  On the way there he explained that a young woman in her early 20s had presented to the ED complaining of bloody stools and had low blood pressure. She had been seen by one of the intern physicians who was also working that day. The doctor tho ..read more

Our team was thrilled to participate in the 4th African Conference on Emergency Medicine this month in Kigali, Rwanda. Thanks to the conference’s close proximity to Uganda, 18 GEC team members were able to attend the three-day event, from Emergency Care Practitioners, researchers and students, in addition to U.S.-based board members, staff, and volunteers.  Nyakibale Research Coordinator, Adrine Kusasira, and Research Associate, Charles Ndyamwijuka, did an excellent job in their first presentation. They worked with GEC volunteer, Ashley Pickering, to present on factors contributing to ..read more