By Tom Neill | Operations Director
GECC is honored to report that Dr. Heather Hammerstedt and the GECC team have published a paper in the Annals of Emergency Medicine. The paper - Addressing WHO Resolution 60.22: A Pilot Project to Create Access to Acute Care Services in Uganda - discusses the collaboration between GECC and local and national stakeholders in Nyakibale, Uganda to implement the Emergency Care Practitioner (ECP) program, an innovative emergency care training program. To our knowledge, this is the first description of using task shifting in general hospital-based emergency care through creation of a new nonphysician clinician cadre, the emergency care practitioner. Task shifting is defined as a process of delegation where tasks are moved, when appropriate, to less specialized health workers. By reorganizing the workforce in this way, task shifting presents a viable solution for improving health care coverage by making more efficient use of the human resources already available and by quickly increasing capacity while training and retention programs are expanded. The ECP program provides an example of how emergency care can be practically implemented in low-resource settings in which physician numbers are limited.
In addition, GECC is proud to announce the reinvigoration of our blog that will document days in the lives of the Emergency Care Practioner program in Nyakibale, Uganda. GECC's Program Director, Ryan Brandt, will be the main voice provided content and updates to the new blog. We will also invite board members, physician volunteers, and trained ECPs to guest blog about their experiences in Nyakibale and beyond. The introductory blog post was upload a few days ago. Here is a link to blog: http://globalemergencycare.org/category/news/
Thank you for being part of creating sustainable change and improving the lives of others around the world. As we continue to expand our programming and, in turn, access to emergency medicine in East Africa and Cambodia, we understand that there is significant work ahead. As always, please tell you friends and family about the important work that you are doing through your support of GECC and ask that they get involved as well. Together we continue to change lives.
With gratitude,
Tom Neill, Operations Director, GECC
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