No fewer than ten Doctors, Nurses and other Paramedics have commenced a five-day Basic Emergency Care Providers Course for Emergency Healthcare Workers at the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa Teaching Hospital (ATBU-TH) in Bauchi State to manage patients in life-threatening conditions.
The training was organized by North East Development Commission (NEDC) in collaboration with the Federal Ministry of Health for healthcare providers in the North East sub-region.
Speaking during the opening ceremony yesterday at the hospital in Bauchi, a Consultant Urologist and Chairman Medical Advisory Council of ATBU-TH Dr. Haruna Usman Liman said that Bauchi is situated at a very confluence of many major trucks roads so accidents and emergency bound, hence appropriate care should be instituted at the right time to save many lives.
“It is a thing joy for this hospital to be nominated to participate in this kind of training program because it is a tertiary centre that does not have a well-developed and elaborate emergency culture, which is a very serious problem ”
” All the stakeholders have been carefully selected to be trained for this program and it will not stop with them because they will go back to their various units and step down the training to other staff. We hope with time, so many people within the hospital will imbibe this emergency culture and become proficient in the art of instituting emergency care with laid down protocols and interventions to save lives” he said
He noted that the responsibility of delivering emergency care does not only rest on the shoulders of a doctor, adding that the person who was able to transit with the ambulance to the side of the emergency may be the best to save life at the point of occurrence.
“By the time the patient is brought to the hospital where elaborate investigation and treatment can be instituted, other health workers can be involved.ATBU teaching hospital is very grateful to the Federal Ministry of Health and North East Development Commission for taking the initiative to station this training program in this hospital and we pray that this will continue on a sustainable basis to train and retrain our staff, build capacity and allow them to cascade this training to other facilities within the neighborhood of Bauchi to develop the art of cutting edge of emergency care in line with global best practice,” he added
Earlier in his remarks, A Facilitator and Mater Trainer at the exercise, Dr. Ibrahim Sahabo said that the basic emergency care was designed by the World Health Organization (WHO) in collaboration with ICRC and the International Federation of Emergency Medicine, the body that provides the certification for all the participants at the training.
Sahabo explained that the training is aimed at equipping frontline health workers with the requisite skills to able to rapidly assess and manage patients in life-threatening conditions, adding that before now there was no training that is particularly targeted at emergency care but the initiative was introduced to Nigeria in 2021.
“We now have a cohort of Master trainers in Nigeria and we hope by the end of this set of trainers at ATBU-TH we will be able to step down this training to other lesser cadre in the medical profession so as to improve the needed manpower this services,” Sahabo said
On his part, the Representative of the State Coordinator of North East Development Commission (NEDC) in Bauchi State Abdulkadir Ibrahim Baba charged the participants to utilize the opportunity and acquire the requisite skills and step down the knowledge to achieve the desire objectives, adding that the training is going on across the six states of Borno, Yobe, Taraba, Adamawa , Gombe and Bauchi to update the skills of health providers on basis emergency care to save more lives in the region and the country at large.
