By Tom Neill | Operations Director
Global Emergency Care Collaborative is excited to announce our new partnership with Ronald McDonald House Charities (RMHC). Last month, GECC was awarded a two-year grant to save children’s lives by training non-physician clinicians to provide acute, emergency care services at Masaka Regional Referral Hospital in Masaka, Uganda.
This new program comes at a particularly opportune time. We know that the majority of pediatric mortality and morbidity in resource-limited settings is due to common diseases that have inexpensive treatments. And, from our pilot site data we know that task-shifting emergency care to more prevalent clinicians offers an affordable, scalable solution that can significantly improve patient outcomes.
Our challenge is to scale up the training of non-physician clinicians at Masaka Regional Referral Hospital, a large, public hospital that averages 6-8 times the number of patients that present at our pilot site hospital in Nyakibale. We relish the opportunity to prove that the development of scalable, affordable emergency care systems can significantly impact death and disease outcomes in low-resource settings.
We project that emergency care can prevent 1 death for every 20 children sick enough to be admitted to the hospital, and can prevent 1 death for every 41 children with severe malaria. In comparison with other common public health interventions, these results are substantial; for example, the measles vaccine prevents approximately 1 death per 500 vaccines given.
Presently, GECC is preparing the groundwork to begin program implementation in May or June. We look forward to building a successful Emergency Care Practitioner program in partnership with Masaka Regional Referral Hospital, the Uganda Ministry of Health, and RMHC.
For additional information about this program and GECC, please visit our website, like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter.
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