Air Force surgeons train Hondurans

  • Published
  • By Army Sgt. Jorge Gomez
  • Joint Task Force-Bravo Public Affairs
SOTO CANO AIR BASE, Honduras (AFPN) --  In a Third World country like Honduras, trauma-care surgeons are in short supply, forcing first-line doctors to perform life-saving operations on demand.

A seven-person team from Wilford Hall Medical Center at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, joined with support people from the medical element at Joint Task Force-Bravo. They took 40 selected Honduran surgeons through a train-the-trainer course here Oct. 18 to 20.

Training included treating shock, fractures, and dislocations, and controlling hemorrhage and damage.

Lt. Col. (Dr.) Brian Perry, trauma care team chief, visited Honduras two months ago to survey the needs of the doctors and develop training materials accordingly.

“I saw that small hospitals throughout the country were having to provide the initial care to trauma patients, and they were unprepared for the task,” Dr. Perry said.

The surgeons were familiar with most of the material covered, but they did not have a protocol or method of teaching these critical skills because trauma care is not formally taught in medical school to family practice doctors, said Dr. Hugo Orellana, a Honduran surgeon.

“We wanted the Americans to helps us establish a teaching framework to formalize a trauma care sequence to increase our general care doctors’ abilities to save lives,” Dr. Orellana said.

A doctor who does not normally treat trauma patients may be tempted to first treat what is most apparent, such as a leg fracture, when, in fact, the patient may be suffering from a graver internal problem such as a hemorrhage, said Dr. Jose Calix, another Honduran surgeon.

“With the assistance of the U.S. military doctors, I was able to perfect a hemorrhage-control technique I once performed on a patient,” Dr. Calix said.

A technique that can improve the blood circulation of a patient in shock requires the use of expensive instruments that Hondurans do not have. The American doctors demonstrated how to maximize the instruments the Hondurans currently have to perform the same life-saving technique, said Dr. Carlos Duron, a liaison officer for the medical element.

The Honduran surgeons can now train the remaining 160 surgeons in the country. Programs are already scheduled in these critical skills, Dr. Orellana said.