Medics in Sudan taught to treat gunshot wounds on smartphones
Hadeel, along with hundreds of other Sudanese healthcare workers, uses an international platform called Project ECHO to connect with medical experts worldwide and get quick, real-time advice on how to treat her patients, via a messaging app on her phone. In Sudan, doctors are not taught trauma medicine, meaning many were left scrambling to deal with the sudden influx of injuries and diseases brought on by the civil war. ECHO employs specialised consultants from around the world and connects them with those who need their expertise. The concept is simple, yet effective – move knowledge, not patients. The non-profit was founded in New Mexico in 2003, by US-based doctor Dr Sanjeev Arora. At the time, Dr Arora was one of the few doctors in the state trained to treat complex hepatitis-C infections. When one of his distant patients died of the disease – purely because she lived too far away to regularly visit his clinic in Albuquerque – he set up a programme to share his specialised training with other doctors remotely, using teleconferencing. Fast …