Content Resources

It is estimated that 3-10% of people in the developing world are disabled. The care of disabled children in Sub Saharan Africa is nearly nonexistent. Africa lacks sufficient specialists to provide reasonable care for the vast majority of disabled children, and very few training programs are training such specialists in Africa. A remedial solution for surgical care is necessary in order to provide for this need. Selected doctors with surgical skills might be trained to provide 10-15 surgical procedures thereby providing care for possibly 80-85% of the surgical needs of the disabled. I am a general surgeon who began providing surgical care for the disabled thirty years ago. The care expanded to include children with polio, club feet, burn contractures, club feet, hypospadias, hydrocephalus, spina bifida, and various other disabilities.

Nearly all global under-five mortality (U5M) (99%) occurs in developing countries. The leading causes of U5M worldwide, pneumonia and diarrheal illness, account for 1.396 and 0.801 million annual deaths, respectively. While important advances in prevention are being made, advanced life support (ALS) management in children in the developing world is often incomplete due to limited resources. Existing ALS management guidelines for children in LR settings are largely empirical not evidence-based, written for the hospital setting, not standardized with a systematic approach to patient assessment and categorization of illness, and taught in current pediatric ALS training courses from the perspective of full-resource settings. Extending higher quality emergency and critical care services to children in the developing world is the focus of this session. Simple inexpensive ALS management when integrated into existing programs of primary care can improve child survival across the globe.

The pediatric pain control breakout session will cover how to determine the best drugs for basic pain control as well as procedural pain control. How to access goals of pain control will be covered. Discuss current available drugs and their potential risks and benefits. Discuss assessing the patient pre-procedure to determine if planned sedation/pain control is safe, including appropriate NPO guidelines, airway assessment, and cardiovascular assessment. Discuss basic monitoring and resuscitation needs for safely doing pediatric procedural pain control.

This breakout session will focus on Challenges and Changes as we move forward in Global Pediatrics touching briefly on patient care, research, and teaching. Will include ways to link and dialog and work together with our international partners

Care of burned patients in the developing world with special emphasis on Nursing care will be discussed. Oral rehydration techniques and other necessary adaptations for appropriate care in limited resource environments will be presented.

This workshop will explore the challenges frequently encountered as well as how to assess and deal with health issues that specifically occur with human trafficking in low resourced areas.

Advanced reproductive technology can accomplish many things today to produce children but the salient question is should these things be done? In a country with minimal regulation available, practitioners must thoughtfully determine their own position on these issues based upon their spiritual beliefs and ethical values. This workshop will update attendees on the types of things being proposed or done today and Christian principles to be considered in examining these procedures

Triage by definition means that resources are too limited to handle the extent of the disease being presented. It is always a difficult and stressful situation for the healthcare provider who sometimes must allow some to die so that others might live. Practicing in the developing world, with its much more severe limitations, often changes the application of triage principles in a way which increases stress. Principles of triage in the developed world will be reviewed and practical examples from the developing world will be worked out in a group setting. Participants are encouraged to help mission hospitals develop appropriate plans for handling mass casualty and the numbers of other people that will flock to the hospital.

Abdominal pain in the tropics includes many of the same diseases as elsewhere but there are conditions that are unique. Using a case-based approach, some of the more common of the conditions that cause acute abdominal pain will be discussed. Approaches to diagnosis and treatment, especially those that are not obvious to the practitioner from N. America, will be discussed in an interactive style.

This session will: - Provide an overview of the burden of cancer in Africa - Review the availability of treatment moralities in under-served areas of Africa - Give an overview of the oncology program that is being developed at Mbingo

Teaching Life Support in resource limited ares, Why, What and How.In this session we will discuss what is appropriate to teach in resource limmited areas, who should be taught and proven methods for teaching. Experiences will be shared from Ecuador, Cameroon, Kenya and Nepal and Madagascar