Lisa Charles
Medical Director – Victoria Hospital
The goodwill from St. Lucia’s participation in the Developing EM Conference in Cuba continues to flow our way. This month through the hard work of Dr. Elena Cavazzoni – Paediatric Intensivist; Children’s Hospital at West mead, Australia, whom we met in Cuba and Dr. Bruce Lister – Lead Instructor; Paediatric Intensivist and Anaesthesiologist; Director of Training, Department of paediatric Critical Care Medicine, Mater Children’s Hospital , Queensland, Australia, St. Lucia will host its first ever Paediatric Intensive Care Basic Course!
We have thirty local nurses and doctors signed up for this fully sponsored course. Just over eight paediatric intensivists from as far away as New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the US and as close as Barbados will run the two day workshop – May 20th and 21st.
What is even more exciting is that our colleagues from the University of the West Indies in Barbados under the guidance of Dr. Michele Lashley together with Paeds Basic will run a train the trainer workshop so that we build capacity locally to continue training on our own.
St. Lucia has a three bed ICU with the most basic equipment. The provision of ICU care to Paediatric patients is a challenge with the current equipment and absence of intensivists. This course is certainly a step in the right direction to elevating our ability to safely approach the initial management of critically ill paediatric patients.
We will send lots of pics and updates your way after the course.
Also update on our new portable sonosite from Matt and Mike of Ultrasound podcast is being put to great use in our ICU – the head nurse assures me that “it is being used all the time…great things are happening!”