Global Emergency Medicine Programmes

Ghana

The tragic collapse of the Accra Sports Stadium in May 2001, which resulted in the deaths of 127 Ghanaians, saw the Ghana government recognise the need for developing emergency medicine as a specialty. In response to public outcry, the Ghanaian government established a new national Accident and Emergency Center in Kumasi. This saw the development of a formalised emergency medicine residency programme for doctors and nurses in 2009 at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Kumasi and since then another programme has been developed at Korle Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra.

The RCEM has been working with the Ghana College of Physicians and Surgeons since 2021 with funding from the Department of Social Care (DHSC)/THET.

The first year focused on supporting the key goal of ensuring an “adequate health workforce with the requisite knowledge, skills, competences and attitudes” and was achieved through, supporting with the development of Ghana’s Emergency Medicine curricula, and developing a framework and set of resources to replicated best practice across other specialities​. In April 2022 the team carried out an international accreditation assessment visit of focusing on identifying areas for improvement and providing appropriate responses and recommendations​.

Train the trainer sessions on the latest approaches in medical education, including workplace-based assessments were conducted, through a hybrid approach culminating in an in-person session delivered in to over 90 trainers in Ghana​ as a part of the African Conference of Emergency Medicine.

Following this RCEM was successful in receiving a large-scale grant from DHSC/THET to continue supporting the following key areas:

• Pilot project at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology to develop plans to decentralise emergency care away from the two main tertiary centres.
• Development of leadership in Emergency Medicine​, through adapting the RCEM EM leader’s programme
• Virtual lectures linked the GCPS curricula with a focus on bi-directional learning
• International exchanges of RCEM members and GCPS EM faculty members.

Uganda

RCEM signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Dr. Diana Kanzira Atwine, Permanent Secretary of the Uganda Ministry of Health in April 2023. Together with the Uganda UK Health Alliance, RCEM is working to support Uganda’s efforts to help built healthcare capacity in Emergency Medicine.

Currently, working with Regional Referral Hospitals and their paired academic institutions identified by the MoH as sites of Clinical Excellence, and UK Trusts with a strong interest and passion in Global Health, a programme of virtual clinical grand rounds has been established within the SCALE Programme – https://uukha.org/scale/

In 2023 a Global Capacity Building Small Grant was won from the Tropical Health Education Trust (THET), the focus of which was Trauma Management. This enabled UK Specialists and Nurses to hold face to face teaching in Ultrasound scanning in trauma (EFAST- Emergency Focused Assessment with Sonography in Trauma), Traumatic Brain Injury, as well as work on the development and implementation of a Trauma tool to assist junior doctors and nurses.

This grant also allowed work towards building a partnership between St Mary’s Hospital, Lacor and Royal United Hospital, Bath for mutual exchange of education, support, staff and to build up a faculty for supporting training in Emergency Medicine. In addition to this, support is ongoing for the development of an MMED EM programme at Gulu University along with Gulu Regional Referral Hospital.