Email

Print

Dr. Mark Bruce - American College of Emergency Physicians
"We have a long standing relationship with Belize and Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital. I'm adjunct faculty with the Medical College of Wisconsin who 6 years ago basically started working on a program to strengthen emergency care in Belize and this was in agreement with the ministry of health, Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital and the Medical College of Wisconsin. So since that time we have been working on doing just that. First starting here in the A&E at Karl Heusner to work with the doctors and the nurses and with BERT, the pre hospital provider in this area to do just that, to strengthen emergency care."

Alex Courtenay, 7News
"So what sort of areas do you typically look at in terms of that need strengthening or that need to be carefully looked at and to plan different or better?"

Dr. Mark Bruce - American College of Emergency Physicians
"Once the full scope of any that happens in the A&E, it is basically dealing with that acutely injured and ill patient and it involves basically the first time anybody comes in contact with that person, be it out on the road with RTA's or if it's even at home when somebody becomes acutely ill. That's the challenge of emergency medicine, is dealing with that full spectrum of disease and full spectrum of injury, full spectrum of age. So it goes from the very youngest patients, even before they are born, to those older patients too, because they all have emergency needs. The emergency care, the emergency medicine specialty is particularly challenging because of that."

Alex Courtenay, 7News
"Now we know that you come down here very often to teach the emergency care givers here in Belize what they can do, but what sort of things do you learn from experiencing what you are doing here in Belize and how we handle certain situations?"

Dr. Mark Bruce - American College of Emergency Physicians
"it's a great question and I told our group here that we always leave here feeling that we have learned more than we have taught, that we have gotten more than we have given and it is so important because we don't pretend to know all the answers for Belize. what we do is share the expertise that we have obtained basically through our own training and our own years of experience and practicing our emergency medicine and we share that and allow the core group here to really contextualize that to Belize and apply it to Belize. Because we can't effectively do that but your people, the core group here the Belizeans that we have trained here can and they were much better at it than we are."

Bruce mentioned that the Belizean trainees are now proficient enough to teach emergency medical staff from other hospitals.