The healthcare delivery in the emergency department is slowly becoming a priority in Pakistan. What started two decades ago in one part of Pakistan has gained enough traction across Pakistan that young doctors and medical students have started looking into Emergency Medicine as career and life style. The collective efforts of people working in the emergency departments across Pakistan as well as outside Pakistan are slowly progressing. We developed a frame work in the summit on Emergency Medicine a few years ago with creation of a document. That document is paving the way in bringing people together and translating the document into practical steps towards the goal of enhancing Emergency Care across Pakistan.
We started the journey with the aim to have a trained Emergency Physician in all Emergency Departments across Pakistan. What seems to be a straight forward easy path is actually arduous task, requiring input and agreement of many stakeholders. Emergency Department is the most sensitive area of the hospital, as the time is of essence and at times making specialties provide timely definitive care becomes an issue. The skills and competence of emergency care providers (doctors and nurses and paramedics) becomes extremely important as not just providers of the care but also advocate of the patient.
Developing Emergency care in Pakistan is a noble initiative and plenty of work has been done as well as planned for the future. It revolved around collaboration among the healthcare workers coming together and taking ownership of Emergency Departments across Pakistan. The logical path is to develop the staffing based upon agreed curriculum and then have the institutional backing to let the trained staff provide care in the Emergency Departments. The document created through a consensus during the summit has served the good purpose of aligning the efforts and getting the work done with defined priorities.
The local faculty of Emergency Medicine and the international collaborating faculty meets regularly and enthusiastically works to build each and every tract defined in the working document. The work is well supported by all and College of Physicians and Surgeons Pakistan is also kept in loop in the efforts. It revolves around creating Hubs of Learning. The institutions are being identified which can work as the hubs and can work with smaller hospitals to help them develop the department, as well as train the human capital. The development of the human capital or the doctors and nurses as well as paramedics is the most important aspect of this initiative. We plan to do it in the hub and spoke model with technical, teaching and learning involvement from local and international community through online and offline mechanism. We are planning to develop small and medium duration courses and address the local and emergency needs so that the emergency care provision can be enhanced.
Our immediate goal is to have a few centers developed as hubs and also to finish developing the curriculum. You will also develop a simulation program so that distant learning with the developing competence of the people working in the emergency department can be established and similarly uh we uh can have some quality improvement uh scenarios um in place of all those emergency departments which we are trying to develop so that the care level can be enhanced with continued quality improvement project.
I am very hopeful that with the help of local and international collaborators we will be able to provide a better quality emergency care to the citizens of Pakistan in the near future as was the goal of the EM faculty of Pakistan and international community of Pakistani origin emergency physicians.