Saving Lives With Emergency Care in Rural Uganda

Thanks to your help with a successful fundraising drive in September and October, GECC will now be able to expand its programming into Kenya!  GECC had the opportunity to obtain a three-year $100,000 matching grant, and due to your help, GECC successfully raised $24,000 of the $33,000 needed for the first year of the program!

This is exciting news for GECC and for medical services in Kenya.  As you know, GECC has been training midlevel providers in emergency care (Emergency Care Practitioners or ECPS) over the past 5 years in rural Uganda.  With their new skills to treat acute and emergency conditions, these ECPs are saving lives on a daily basis.

Now GECC plans to partner with a renowned teaching institution in Kenya, Kenya Medical Training College (KMTC), to train midlevel providers in emergency care there as well.  Currently, there are no emergency physicians in all of Uganda and only one in Kenya (compared to 45,000 emergency physicians in the U.S.!).  By training midlevel providers in acute and emergency care (much like nurse practitioners or physicians’ assistants in the U.S.), GECC is able to rapidly scale up emergency care to those who need it most. 

Prior to starting the emergency care program in Uganda, patients used to wait, on average, 26 hours to be seen by a physician after arriving to the hospital.  Now patients with emergency conditions are seen and treated rapidly, and they are surviving from easily treatable conditions such as malaria, pneumonia, and trauma.  Due to your help, Kenyan patients will now receive this care as well! 

Thank you for being part of creating sustainable change and improving the lives of others around the world who are less fortunate.  As always, please tell friends and family about the important work that you are doing through your support and ask that they help as well.  Together we are making a difference!

With gratitude,

Stacey

Rural Uganda is considered  a "low resource" setting.  One-third of the residents living in the area of Nyakibale Hospital, where GECC works, have no access to clean water.  Electricity is unreliable and intermittent, where present at all, and the Hospital often has to rely on back-up generators to run the ER and OR. 

Despite these constraints, GECC and its Emergency Care Practitioner (ECP) training program, have creatively and cost-effectively used relatively low-tech devices to provide high quality medical care.  Since "CAT scans" and "MRIs", routinely used in the US to help diagnose emergent conditions in patients, are not available, GECC has trained ECPs in the use of bedside portable ultrasounds.  Due to focused training provided by GECC, the ECPs have become so adept with the use of ultrasound that their skills surpass most emergency trained physicians in the US.  With this skill, they have been able to diagnose life threatening conditions including internal bleeding in trauma patients, ectopic pregnancies in women, and bowel obstructions in children.  The ECPs have then been able to initiate emergent life-saving care!

Once again, GECC would like to thank you for your support of this important work.  In a region where people don't even have running water and electricity, it is amazing that these people CAN get emergency medical care due to your generous help.  Please consider renewing your donation and spreading the word about our work to continue helping those who need it most!

Our sincere thanks,

The GECC team