The International diaspora of Emergency Physicians are always seen as greatest help for the development of Emergency Medicine in Pakistan. The last two decades of Emergency Medicine struggle in Pakistan is inundated with continuous involvement of international faculty of Emergency Physicians in the most positive way and has resulted in making a positive impact. We were incredibly lucky to have Dr. Taj Hassan visiting Pakistan and going through different Emergency Departments to celebrate the success of our combined struggle for the EM in Pakistan.
The second decade of organized Emergency Medicine in Pakistan has brought its challenges as well as opportunities. The challenges are mostly the same that we are facing since the earlier phases of Emergency Medicine development. These included limited job opportunities for the trained Emergency Physicians, ownership of Emergency Department, limited training opportunities, safety and security of people working in the ED, and human resource as well as logistic constraints. There are some new challenges which are the development of leadership traits into the trainees, updating the curriculum to make it more relevant to our situation, and standardization of the training across all departments in Pakistan.
The opportunities are also many folds. We are growing into a sizeable EM community, and it is a great opportunity to expand the EM into other parts of Pakistan where the Emergency Department is still run by untrained doctors. We also need to work on increasing awareness of doctors, nurses, and paramedics regarding importance of emergency care and its value in the acute care and out of hospital settings. By increasing number of supervisors of training we have now created the required resource to update the curriculum, improve the quality of examination and also improve the training across the board.
The visit of Dr. Taj Hassan was instrumental in bringing people together both nationally and internationally. We have developed a framework already through our collective work in the past in one of the workshop 4 years ago. Now building on that collaborative thinking and collective wisdom we developed the concept of cHALO (collaborative Hubs of Learning Organizations). It is work in progress yet shaping up to what looks like a good model for improving the competence of people already working in the Emergency Department.
The visit of Dr. Hassan included workshops in 4 emergency department across Pakistan. It included Indus Hospital in Karachi, Central Park Hospital in Lahore, Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar and Military Hospital in Rawalpindi. Each workshop had local and national as well as international flavor and attracted good number of audiences. We were able to create a good impact and were also able to clear some concepts regarding Emergency Medicine. We feel that through the energy created by all national and international faculty we will be able to move further into making cHALO concept a reality. This could in due time help improve the care in general for all patients coming to the Emergency Departments across Pakistan.