—stresses need for substantial fundingThe Accident and Emergency (A&E) Unit at any hospital is very important. Here, in Guyana, the Georgetown Public Hospital (GPHC)’s A&E is dubbed “the gateway to Guyana’s public healthcare system.”Kenneth IsersonIts operation has been gaining close attention from world renowned Professor of Emergency Medicine, Dr. Kenneth Iserson. Dr Iserson is one of the first Emergency Medicine Specialists in the United States. In fact the author of the famous medical book ‘Improvised Medicine’ has helped to develop the specialty in the US, and has also been doing so globally.Dr. Iserson, who is well respected among emergency physicians, recently shared his thoughts about visiting Guyana and sought to highlight what measures can be taken to help improve the GPHC’s A&E Unit and by extension, the delivery of health care.Below are the responses to some questions recently posed to Dr. Iserson.WHY DID YOU COME TO GUYANA?It was supposed to be a one-time trip so I could help at a relatively new Emergency Medicine training programme. I work and teach around the globe, particularly in resource-poor countries. Having worked in rural sub-Saharan Africa, I am familiar with resource scarcity—Guyana is not at that level. My experiences working in Antarctica showed me what medicine in an isolated setting is like—Guyana’s interior has some of those qualities. Yet, Guyana is uniquely different from any of these locales: relatively poor and with an underfunded healthcare system trying to serve the needs of an urban, rural and remote population.WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST IMPRESSION OF THE GPHC’s A&E UNIT?When I first entered Guyana’s GPHC Accident and Emergency (A&E), it fit my expectations for a poor country’s typical neglected public hospital: overcrowded, understaffed, and poorly equipped.The waiting room was jammed with patients and families, many in wheelchairs or on stretchers. Staff and visitors were passing through the department for easy access to the hospital. Very ill patients filled the broken stretchers, and other extremely ill patients filled the mass of chairs inside and the benches outside the department.Occasionally ambulance stretchers held patients between A&E beds. The few staffers sweated profusely (the AC usually didn’t work) as they worked to keep up with the patient flow, sometimes having to take over “bagging” a patient in whom a breathing tube had been inserted, since no intensive care beds or ventilators were available in the hospital.The referral phone was almost constantly ringing with calls from a regional hospital, or an interior health clinic signaling that physicians were transferring a patient needing more help than they could provide. Unfortunately, many calls also came from private hospitals that would no longer care for a patient who had run out of money. That was what was obvious.WHAT WAS IMPORTANT ABOUT GPHC A&E THAT YOU DID NOT IMMEDIATELY SEE?What I did not initially appreciate was the extraordinary talent and motivation of the Guyanese physicians training in Emergency Medicine and the dogged commitment of their Vanderbilt University Emergency Medicine faculty. (Reference is being made here to Dr Zulfikar Bux who currently holds the position of Head of the A&E Unit)The first class of Guyanese Emergency Medicine residents consisted of one physician. On my first visit,China Jerseys, he was in his last year of the three-year programme. A University of Guyana graduate, he shared a vision for the future of the specialty and for improved emergency medical care throughout Guyana. Two larger groups of residents were in their first and second years.Based on the U.S. model for training Emergency Medicine specialist physicians, the GPHC programme represents the optimal graduate medical education model that other less-developed nations can follow.Of the eight residents who have graduated, seven work at GPHC and one has returned to direct emergency care in her homeland of Antigua and Barbuda. All are now providing the highest levels of emergency care that is possible given the limited resources they have on hand.HOW LIMITED ARE THE PUBLIC MEDICAL SYSTEM’S RESOURCES?Most people outside of the medical profession do not realize that Guyana’s public healthcare system has no Labaria (poisonous snake) antivenin, no clot-busting drugs for strokes, no rabies vaccine, no free CT scanning, very limited x-ray capability,Cheap NFL Jerseys China, and inadequate medications, medical supplies and equipment. These shortages are even more acute in the regional hospitals.Of course, CTs, x-rays, and many medications are available in the private sector. This often frustrates our GPHC emergency physicians, since they would love to diagnose and treat their patients using the optimal methods,Wholesale NFL Jerseys 2018</