The Trauma Team Training (TTT) course is identified as one of the rare trauma courses emphasizing on teamwork with the ultimate aim to equip doctors, nurses and other healthcare providers with appropriate knowledge and teamwork skills to safely care for injured patients and to optimize their outcomes.
Photo taken from CNIS website (www.CNIS.ca)
The Center for Global Surgery at the McGill University Health Center in collaboration with the Canadian Network of International Surgery (CNIS), has been actively administrating this course in several Low and middle income countries including Tanzania. Most recently, the course was given at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Kigali (CHUK) in Rwanda.
The Emergency Department (ED) at CHUK receives approximately 12,000 new patients each year where the majority are injured patients often presenting with head and extremity injuries. The ED has been under the jurisdiction of other departments such as surgery and internal medicine for many years. However, recently, the ED has started working as an independent department faced with the challenge to build capacity for its own personnel especially in trauma resuscitation. The ED has since then developed and put in place team-based multidisciplinary resuscitation systems with the TTT course contributing to the fulfillment of this goal.
The two TTT workshops have been a great success so far. All participants found the course and skills taught very useful and showed interest in having regular refreshment sessions.We are convinced that the exposure to such courses will greatly impact the quality of care delivered to trauma patients, and that team-based resuscitation skills will significantly improve especially for Emergency Department Staff.
Written by: Dr. Jean Claude Byiringiro (MD, MMED) - Head of Emergency Department/CHUK