New Blood Learning Center original school house. The campus has grown immensely and now houses multiple classroom buildings. The original structure is still used for assemblies and evening Buddhist prayers.
Visit to New Blood Learning Center
Last weekend, two of my closest friends in Mae Sot, who happen to be married to each other and are also physicians, invited me to visit the New Blood Learning Center. Located in Nong Bwa Village, about 4 km outside Mae Sot, this incredible organization provides much-needed education (and much more) to 200 boarding and 800 day students. Most students are children of migrant workers or they and their families have been displaced by armed conflict in Myanmar, including an influx of students since the 2021 military coup. The school also provided critical support for my friends when they first arrived in Mae Sot, providing social, food, and housing support while they established themselves and found jobs allowing them to rent their own home. One of my friends also taught the GED program until recently, when he began a new job that allows him to utilize his medical training. During our visit, it felt more like meeting my friends' family than their colleagues and the positive energy I felt during my visit was palpable. We enjoyed a delicious dinner with the school staff and students and toured the campus, learning about the school's history and current programming. I even had a chance to virtually meet a former New Blood graduate who is now continuing her studies in Finland (one of the 20 New Blood graduates to matriculate at international universities) as she video-called her friends at dinner!
I also had the opportunity to try my hand at Chinlone, a Burmese traditional sport that can most aptly be described as a hybrid of football (soccer) and volleyball. It is similar and often referred to as Sepak takraw in other Southeast Asian countries.
Chinlone Ball
New Blood Learning Center is not registered as a tax-deductible charity in Western countries, given the cost and complexities of such a designation. However, they are engaged in excellent work, and if you are interested in donating to the school, please visit their donation page or contact me directly. I am happy to help facilitate a donation.
Video of evening prayer at New Blood Learning Center
2nd Batch Basic Emergency Care Course
Today we completed our second modified WHO Basic Emergency Care Course, with 12 medic and nurse-aid participants graduating. We now have trained a total of 31 MTC staff members in the principles of treating acutely ill and injured patients. We have also trained a team of 10 BEC course facilitators who have completed the BEC training of the trainer course and have acted as a facilitator for at least one BEC course, demonstrating proficiency in presenting interactive lectures, running small groups, and teaching hands-on skills. We continue to receive very positive feedback from our participants, especially regarding our interactive teaching style. Although to become successful emergency providers additional training is required for our future ECU staff, the BEC course provides a common approach to emergent patients from which they can build future knowledge and skills. Our facilitator group, which consists of doctors, medics, and nurse-aids, demonstrates the importance of the entire team in providing emergency care. This team-focused approach fosters a culture of working together and respecting the knowledge and ideas of all team members, regardless of their training. We also have plans for our BEC facilitator group to help run an emergency care in a conflict settings course for the medic training programs affiliated with the Burma border ethnic health organizations. Our next BEC course at MTC will be held in late February or early March, followed by another TOT.
One of our new BEC facilitators, who is a senior medic, demonstrating the anatomic location for needle decompression (see video below) before participants practice performing the skill. This is potentially life saving procedure for patients with a tension pneumothorax (see below). Although these may occur spontaneously, unfortunately, this pathology often occur due to gun shot wounds or after landmine/other explosive injuries; all of which are occurring at increased rates due to violence associated with the Myanmar coup.
Tension Pneumothorax
Emergency Care Needs Assessment
After my close colleague who is a Burmese emergency medicine trained physician highlighted his desire to perform an emergency care needs assessment along the Myanmar-Thai border region, we began collaborating with the Ethnic Health System Strengthening Group (EHSSG) and local ethnic health organizations to organize a pilot emergency care needs assessment in a region of Karenni State. This is a needed study given the multiple complexities of delivering healthcare in eastern Myanmar border are due to long-standing conflict between ethnic groups and the Myanmar military which have been further complicated since the Myanmar military coup three years ago. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimates that 2.6 million people are internally displaced within Myanmar. [1] This is compounded by the multi-factorial breakdown of the Myanmar medical system, including approximately 65% of the healthcare workforce joining the Civil Disobedience Movement demanding democracy and an end to the military's perpetrated atrocities, thus being unable to work within official government-sanctioned healthcare settings. [2] The increasing vulnerability of Myanmar's population and rising conflict injuries highlight the need for a comprehensive assessment of emergency care capacity along the Myanmar-Thailand border to develop appropriate interventions to improve the quality of emergency care systems in these regions.
We are currently writing our study protocols, confirming the region of our pilot study, and submitting a research proposal to the Community Ethics Advisory Board (CEAB), the ethnic health Institutional Review Board (IRB) based at the Mae Tao Clinic. Approval by an IRB is a critical step in any research project to ensure the protection of research participants, especially as our research involves vulnerable populations, including internally displaced peoples, migrants, and refugees. Although the population we will be interacting with is vulnerable, we do not anticipate individual harm to befall participants as our project is based on interviews with healthcare workers to fill out validated emergency care assessment tools. We will not be collecting individual patient information or medical records. Click here for a brief history of IRBs.
If you want a PBS style 20 minute video on the history of protecting human subjects in research you may enjoy the video below...
ECG Course:
We continue to develop our ECU ECG curriculum. We have several lectures created and are now going through a process of review by several Burmese physicians and MTC senior medics to ensure the content and level of training are appropriate for our context. I am also assisting in a CPR and Automatic External Defibrillator (AED) training course for the MTC Bachelor of Nursing class. We will assess how this course is received by the students and trainers as we work to plan our ECU CPR and AED course for the upcoming months. More about that in the next blog post.
Beach Day!
Although Mae Sot is NOT on the ocean, I did have a wonderful afternoon at a funky beach themed restaurant/bar complete with an artificial beach including kids swimming pool, sand, fake background, and real coconut trees. My friend's 4 year old son wanted to swim and build a sand castle so we made a "beach day" this past weekend and all of us had a great time splashing around the pool and building sand castles, it was a day to remember.
Citations:
Myanmar Humanitarian Update No. 35 | 2023 Year in Review Source OCHA Posted 12 Jan 2024 Originally published 12 Jan 2024
UK-EHO Health Partners Sharing & Learning Event. 1st and 2nd December 2023.
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