Abdus Salam Khan, MD FACP
President Pakistan Society of Emergency MedicineThe COVID-19 pandemic has shown the vulnerability of our healthcare system. The emergency Department caters to all patients coming to be taken care of, and during this pandemic as the the whole hospital was scaling down its functions, yet the emergency department was relied upon for all care. All COVID and non-COVID patients were sent to the emergency department to be sorted and treated with safety in mind. Although it was a good decision but because of lack of trained doctors and nurses in the the emergency departments, the response was not as good as it could have been. We saw a lot of doctors getting exposed and some of them loosing their life while working. This was all avoidable if our emergency departments would have been equipped with trained human resource.
Emergency Departments across the world is run by trained individuals whether nurses or doctors and they work as team to provide safe and effective care to all patients. In Pakistan we are still lagging behind and with each disaster or incidence like COVID we see lost opportunity to provide better care for our patients.
Emergency medicine already have it’s footing in Pakistan for the last two decades. We did have a very slow start as acceptance in public institutions is a big problem. All tertiary care public hospitals have big and busy emergency departments yet no trained emergency physician or nurse. Since 2010 through college of physicians and surgeons, institutions across Pakistan started training programs in emergency medicine. Since that time about eleven institutions have embarked on the journey to train doctors for emergency medicine. There are only handful of trained doctors that are serving in the system in Pakistan.
We feel that the situation needs to change in order to improve the health care delivery. We feel that a few very important steps need to be taken by the government to support this important specialty. These key steps include starting triage system in all emergency departments across Pakistan and then having the trained doctors and nurses work in the emergency departments. With limited resources of our nation we need to utilise our resources aptly and focus more on development of smart processes as well as develop human capital to provide emergency care to the citizen of Pakistan.
I hope the decision-makers about the healthcare consider this agenda very carefully and work towards making it a reality. Pakistan Society of Emergency Medicine as well as all doctors and nurses working in the emergency departments are willing to help the cause of developing emergency care through channelising the resources and human capital development. It’s long due and I feel it is time to make it happen.