Global Emergency Care

Global Emergency Care (GEC) trains non-physician clinicians in emergency care to save lives and prevent unnecessary deaths in Uganda. Due to a healthcare worker shortage in Uganda, many patients die from treatable diseases and injuries such as pneumonia, diarrhea, and trauma. GEC developed a sustainable, train-the trainer model that educates Emergency Care Practitioners (ECPs) to provide quality acute care in order to save lives. According to the WHO, deaths from infectious diseases (pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria) and injuries from traffic accidents are responsible for almost 25% of all annual deaths in developing nations. In rural Uganda, this is combined with a critical shortage of trained healthcare providers and leads to numerous deaths from treatable causes. GEC educates nurses, through a sustainable train-the-trainer model, to manage patients in their communities to close the gap in patient care and save lives. GEC provides advanced training in emergency care to nurses, in order to increase access to care where there are severe physician shortages. Nurses are more plentiful than physicians in rural Uganda, and training nurses is less expensive and time-intensive than training doctors. Each year, GEC educates a new class of Emergency Care Practitioners (ECPs) who then become trainers themselves, creating a sustainable process for training more providers and reaching more patients. In rural Uganda, even at a hospital, patients wait for hours or even days to see a doctor. Many die while waiting. GEC trains ECPs to immediately see all sick patients coming to the hospital. With quality care, many patients' lives are saved, including many children who are particularly vulnerable. Saving a patient's life can also save the economic well-being of his family. One ECP will treat at least 40,000 patients over her career, having a beneficial ripple effect on entire communities.