Resident doctors and consultant anaesthetists at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH), Kumasi are benefitting from modern anaesthetic training that equips them to provide safe anaesthesia, thanks to a collaboration between KATH and a visiting medical team from the Hospital for Special Surgeries (HSS) in the USA.

The collaboration is helping control pain through the use of the nerve blocks for patients who undergo orthopaedic and plastic surgeries of the upper and lower limbs.

The predominant reason most patients seek physician help is usually on account of pain.

Known as Global Regional Anesthesia Curriculum Engagement (GRACE), the programme aims to equip physician anaesthetists from the teaching hospital to increase the numbers and types of nerve blocks performed in a bid to better manage pain as well as decrease mortalities stemming from risks of General anaesthesia.

Resident doctor with the Department of Anesthesiology, Dr Alfred Jacob Aidoo, a beneficiary of the programme observed that this intervention was safer and more cost-effective in providing anaesthesia during surgical procedures at the hospital. Injured patients who hitherto endured pain whilst waiting for their turn to be operated would benefit immensely.

“The training programme has been effective since it has increased their confidence level in doing more nerve blocks and teach other visiting physicians anaesthetists from neighbouring countries; beyond that, patients are more comfortable with this method; this intervention will go a long way to encourage physicians to practice the nerve blocks in low resource areas,” Dr Aidoo submitted.

A member of the visiting team, Dr Mark Brouillette said the motivation for the training is as a result of his first encounter with KATH, then a medical student 10 years ago.

He added that, upon his visit to KATH, he undertook research in orthopaedic/ trauma department as well as anaesthesia care, after which he found out that, there were huge numbers of cases where the arms and legs were injured as a result of road accidents.

“At that time, every day we saw severe, open fractures, severely wounded patients who were in a lot of pain. These experiences drove my interest in anaesthesia,” he recounted.

Dr Brouillette added that surgeries were a major problem to patients because of the fear of pain associated with it. According to him, the mortality rate related to surgeries at the hospital was also high. He continued that, with these difficulties, he decided to embark on this training programme with his team to train doctors to better increase skills in pain management and make surgeries safer and also more comfortable with the little resource.

He added that, unlike the general anesthesia, nerve blocks is safer and comes with a lot of advantage. He continued that, the nerve blocks were safer and could reliable for surgeries.

Head of the department, Dr Sanjeev Singh said, the training had been helpful ever since it began, adding, “the training has built the confidence level of doctors to perform nerve blocks for surgeries and also teach.

KATH is a recognized training site for doctors from World Federation of Societies of Anaesthesiologists WFSA and has doctors from Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Egypt and Burkina Faso attend these training programs since it began about a year ago with tremendous success in their set goals.

He was grateful to the team for extending their help to the department in helping curb some of the menaces that comes with surgeries.

It’s encouraging that this partnership has been awarded the Society for Education in Anesthesia (SEA) Philip Liu award for Innovations in Anesthesia Training for the abstract titled Design, Implementation, and Measurement of a Regional Anesthesia Training Program for Limited-Resource Settings.

Beneficiary patients have expressed gratitude to the team from HSS who were at the hospital for two weeks as part of a twice yearly training visit led by Drs Mark Brouillette, Richard Kahn, Jacques Yadeau, Ben Johnson and Patrick Laughlin and also Drs Akwasi Antwi - Kusi, Sanjeev Singh and Alfred Jacob Aidoo who have played no mean roles in pioneering this intervention to ensure practice of safe anaesthesia at KATH. The design of this program is to make it a KATH owned practice to be a center of training.