For the second consecutive year, a team of physicians and other health professionals from Cooper University Health Care’s Critical Care Medicine department traveled to Tanzania to provide advanced medical education at Muhimbili University and Hospital in Dar Es Salaam. Muhimbili Hospital is the largest hospital in Tanzania, with 1500 beds serving a city with a population of more than 7 million people. Tanzania is the most populous country in Eastern Africa bordering on the Indian Ocean, it has more than 60 million people.
“As part of our multi-year effort, we are committed to sharing our knowledge with colleagues around the world to improve patient care. We are honored to partner with budding Intensivists at Muhimbili on their journey to build high reliability intensive care units,” said Nitin Puri, MD, head of Critical Care Medicine at Cooper who organized the trip. The team did 52 hours of teaching at three different hospitals during the trip.
Funded by a grant from The Cooper Foundation, the team taught Fundamentals of Critical Care Support (FCCS), a course developed by Cooper critical care physician Dr. Philip Dellinger for the Society of Critical Care Medicine in 1995. The course is comprised of 26 lectures and hands on skills stations over two days. In Cooper’s effort to build capacity, four of the instructors of the course this year were Tanzanian physicians, with the ultimate goal of the partnership is for the FCCS course to be independently run by physicians in Tanzania.
The training mission is a partnership between Cooper University Hospital, Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta and George Washington University in Washington, DC. In addition to Dr. Puri, the Cooper team included Jason Bartock, MD, Lindsey Glaspey, DO, Adam Green, MD, Brendan Gill, MD, Troy Rivera, MD, and advanced practice providers Eugene McEady NP, Melanie Colgan PA, Joy Bender NP. They were joined by Eric Flenaugh, MD, from Morehouse School of Medicine and Jeffrey Williams, MD, from George Washington University.
Based on the positive feedback of the teaching mission in previous years, the Cooper team, extended the conference by two days, to build on the FCCS course knowledge base and brought a critical care fellow from the Cooper Critical Care fellowship to help with the increased teaching duties. Cooper University Hospital ICU nurse practitioners Eugene McEady (lead) and Joy Bender furthered our relationships in Dar es Salaam by Critical Care lectures to ICU nurses at neighboring Aga Khan Hospital.
The team was in Tanzania from November 1-11, 2023.
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