Population & Family Health

Emergency Care Program in Ghana Mobilizes U.S.-Trained Physicians

Perched alongside an international highway in Ghana’s Brong-Ahafo region, the Kintampo District Hospital is the site of a new program to improve emergency medical care entitled Systems Improvement at District Hospitals and Regional Training of Emergency Care (sidHARTe). As part of the program, emergency medical physician volunteers – educated in the U.S. – train healthcare providers in Ghana. sidHARTe was launched in January by the Mailman School’s Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health and is funded by a grant from the GE Foundation (GE).

Rachel T. Moresky, MD, MPH, assistant clinical professor of Population and Family Health and Medicine, created sidHARTe to improve emergency care in Ghana with a focus on acute illness diagnosis and treatment, trauma care, and the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. When developing the program, Dr. Moresky reached out to the Ghana Health Service (GHS) and established a partnership to ensure that sidHARTe would address the specific needs of the District Hospital and the community. Building on existing relationships, sidHARTe collaborates with individual GHS and GE programs across Ghana to establish and implement a multidisciplinary approach to emergency medicine, thereby ‘diagonalizing’ traditional vertical programs to strengthen emergency care on the district level.

Marrying the larger goals of sidHARTe with the needs of the District Hospital, sidHARTe resident and attending emergency medicine physicians incorporate four major components into their work: clinical service delivery; training healthcare staff; improving health system processes (triage, referral, and pre-hospital care); and monitoring and evaluating associated services and care. The multidisciplinary approach ensures that emergency medical providers in Ghana are prepared to respond to a variety of situations. In Kintampo, a rural district known for a large farming population, clinical training, the healthcare process, clinical services, and hands-on bedside teaching comprise the foundation for volunteer activities.

Said Dr. Moresky, “sidHARTe will hopefully assist healthcare providers to improve their clinical acumen and the process of identifying and treating acutely ill patients. By using a multidisciplinary approach to build the capacity of the emergency care system throughout the Brong Ahafo and Ashanti Regions of Ghana, sidHARTe helps ensure that healthcare providers are better prepared to react to situations ranging from a stabilizing a patient who sustained a blunt trauma from road traffic injury, to treating an eight month old child with pneumonia, or treating a pregnant woman who presents with seizing from eclampsia.” Key areas in which sidHARTe’s U.S.-trained physicians share emergency medical knowledge and skills with healthcare providers on the local, district, and national levels include strengthening the referral process above and below the level of the district hospital; facilitating the appropriate use of life-saving medical equipment; teaching at the national rural schools for mid-level providers and midwifery; and conducting integrated trainings with regional and tertiary level hospitals.

In July, sidHARTe expanded to include the Mampong District Hospital.

“GHS will help direct sidHARTe physicians to provide the requisite training to healthcare staff in Mampong and Kintampo. sidHARTe has collaborated with University of Ghana School of Public Health to assist in conducting the monitoring and evaluation component of the program,” said Dr. Moresky. “The hope is that our work will someday inform locally adapted best practices in emergency care scalable, within Ghana, and possibly across West Africa.”