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    Expeditionary MDG teaches Kyrgyz doctors lifesaving skills

    Expeditionary MDG teaches Kyrgyz doctors lifesaving skills

    Photo By Master Sgt. Nichelle Griffiths | Kyrgyz Medical professionals participate in a practical exercise on basic life support...... read more read more

    TRANSIT CENTER AT MANAS, KYRGYZSTAN

    03.19.2010

    Courtesy Story

    376th Air Expeditionary Wing Public Affairs

    By Staff Sgt. Carolyn Viss

    TRANSIT CENTER AT MANAS, Kyrgyzstan -- U.S. Airmen are teaching hands-on basic and advanced lifesaving skills to doctors in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, March 15-19.

    These 376th Expeditionary Medical Group service members deployed to the Transit Center at Manas, together with an American non-government organization and the Scientific Teaching Language Institute, are teaching the five-day course known as "Train the Trainer." The 15 or so Kyrgyz doctors who are completing the course will then possess the skills to train other doctors in the country.

    Some of the doctors were flown into Bishkek from Osh, the Southern part of the country, where the doctors have even fewer resources to learn life support techniques.

    "There's no emergency room in Kyrgyzstan right now," said Lt. Col. (Dr.) Howard Givens, 376th EMDG chief of Aerospace Medicine. There are, however, different specializing hospitals including heart, lung and brain hospitals which are trying to stand up true ERs.

    "The physicians and nurses here are well trained, and give good care ...," said the doctor, deployed from Charleston Air Force Base, S.C. "However, it's often left to patients to determine who to see" because the physicians here are highly specialized, whereas in the United States many are general practice medical doctors. "There's just a totally different approach to medicine in the East versus Western medicine."

    After a brief lecture on technique, the Kyrgyz doctors were given life-size dummies to practice defibrillating, intubating, performing CPR, and inserting nasopharyngeal tubing.

    This Scientific Teaching Language Institute was established by the state of Kyrgyzstan as a way for doctors and nurses to fulfill post-graduate education, according to Lucas Weilenmann, a Swiss doctor who has been in Kyrgyzstan for four months assisting the NGO in getting this program up and running.

    "Doctors, physical therapists, and nurses are obligated to have post-graduate education," he said. "This STLI project is the start of a big course supported by the German Development Bank."

    Founded over the last six or seven years by Heinrich Schranz, a Swiss emergency room nurse, the program outlines a plan to train all medics involved in emergency medicine in Kyrgyzstan over the next three years, Weilenmann said. Once the training is complete, these doctors will be qualified to train other doctors, and then the only thing they will need to set up ERs throughout the country is the materials.

    "We would not be able to do this without external help," Weilenmann said.

    Transit Center humanitarian assistance funding was able to contribute to the project by helping offset the cost of travel and per diem for the doctors who needed to come over the mountains from the Southern part of Kyrgyzstan, according to Dr. Givens.

    "As professionals, they were eager to learn," said Lt. Col. (Dr.) Tesfay Gselassie, deployed from Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Germany, the largest American hospital outside the United States. Although they were all highly trained and specialized physicians, "they weren't saying, 'we know it all,'" he attested.

    Instead, they were eager to help each other, jumping in to make corrections or comments on each others' procedures, and thinking of all kind of possible scenarios - showing the Air Force doctors that, in fact, when they are qualified to train other doctors they will do an excellent job.

    Throughout the week, the training will become more advanced and culminate in what the military would view as a "field training exercise" - a comprehensive scenario in which the doctors will all work together to assist patients in a simulated emergency situation, according to Dr. Givens.

    "I was impressed by ... the enthusiasm they had for learning new techniques," said Staff Sgt. Pocco Bussey, an independent duty medical technician deployed from Fairchild, Wash. "This was a wonderful experience."

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    NEWS INFO

    Date Taken: 03.19.2010
    Date Posted: 03.22.2010 23:56
    Story ID: 47042
    Location: TRANSIT CENTER AT MANAS, KG

    Web Views: 243
    Downloads: 204

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