Mersey School of Anaesthesia makes pioneering five-year funding award to help train doctors in Nepal

The Mersey School of Anaesthesia (MSA) has announced a five-year funding donation for the first time – to benefit doctors helping Nepal recover from the devastating earthquakes.

Dr Shambhu Acharya (left) with Dr Tushar Dixit

The £5,000 donation to Health Exchange Nepal (HEXN), a UK-based charity, will pay for training programmes for anaesthetists in the Himalayan country.

Nepal’s infrastructure was badly damaged by an earthquake measuring 8.1 on the Richter Scale in 2015, which caused the deaths of 9,000 people and injured more than 20,000 others, with a massive impact on the country’s health system.

Dr Shambhu Acharya of HEXN, who also works as an anaesthetist at Aintree University Hospital, welcomed the donation from the MSA, the first of its kind which the organisation has made.

Dr Acharya said: “This extremely generous support will enable us to provide additional education and training for doctors in Nepal. It will make a tremendous difference to the care which they can offer their patients.

“Knowing that we have an ongoing funding stream from the MSA enables us to plan well ahead, which is very good news indeed. We are incredibly grateful to the MSA.”

Dr Tushar Dixit, Associate Director of MSA and Consultant Anaesthetist at St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospital said “MSA has supported many educational activities related to Anaesthesia within Merseyside for many years. For the first time, MSA is able to provide continuous financial support to improve education and training of doctors in anaesthesiology in Nepal and support HEXN in their commendable work. We feel very fortunate to be associated with HEXN in this noble cause of nation re-building.

 

Anaesthesia Pain and Critical Care Medicine (CURRENT 2016) Refresher Course in Kathmandu

Health Exchange Nepal (UK) organised a refresher course in Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital (TUTH) on 26 August 2016 in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Dr Shambhu Acharya took the responsibility of forming an international faculty and the rest of the faculty members were from TUTH for this meeting. It was an opportunity as well as a challenge to find the experts in the relevant fields who were willing to go to Nepal during a holiday season on a voluntary basis.

Three consultant anaesthetists from Aintree (Dr Shambhu Acharya, Dr Raj Nagaraja and Dr Shetty) and Dr Jagadish Agrawal from Wirral Hospitals and one paediatrician Dr Sujay from United Arab Emirates kindly agreed to be the faculty members to go to Nepal.

A range of topics were included in the course. The international faculty covered the following topics:

  • Anaphylaxis: Dr Shambhu Acharya
  • Complications of regional anaesthesia: Dr Ravish Shetty
  • Pregnancy induced hypertension: Dr Jagadish Agrawal
  • Neonatal resuscitation: Dr N Sujay
  • Critical appraisal of scientific papers: Dr Raj Nagaraja
  • Fluid management in trauma patients: Dr Raj Nagaraja

There were many challenges for our faculty as Nepal lacks many resources and some drugs are not available there and some alternatives were to be found that could be used in Nepal. 

Photo (Left to Right):
Dr Gentle Shrestha, Dr Diptesh Aryal (Co-ordinator for the course in Nepal), Dr Nagaraja, Prof Bimal Kumar Sinha (Acting Dean, Institute of Medicine), Dr Acharya, Prof Marhatta (HoD of Anaesthesia, TUTH), Dr Anil Shrestha