RECORDER REPORT

KARACHI: ChildLife Foundation is introducing diploma and graduate courses training healthcare professionals in paediatric emergencies to overcome the shortage of trained professionals in emergency medicine.

Paediatric emergency medicine is not an established medical field in Pakistan, and training could enable them to become experts in the field, Dr Ahson Rabbani, the foundation’s CEO, told journalists at his office on Tuesday.

For the first time in Pakistan 12 doctors have completed a beginners’ level course of six months at the Foundation, in which they received a Paediatric Emergency Medicine Certificate. The course is a comprehensive education programme for medical practitioners caring for sick children, he explained. The course addresses a full spectrum of emergency illnesses and scenarios the doctors could possibly encounter.

The programme is certified by the Dow University of Health Sciences.

“Our dream is that no sick child in Karachi is more than 30 minutes away from an emergency room providing international-quality care and free of cost medicines,” Dr Ahson said.

In five years ChildLife Foundation has saved the lives of more than one million children through state-of-the-art emergency care at Civil Hospital and at the National Institute of Child Health.

The number of patients has doubled at these hospitals, with more than twelve hundred patients visiting the emergency rooms per day. The cost of a child’s treatment is a modest Rs700. Meanwhile, the foundation has established 17 primary healthcare centres in different parts of Karachi.

ChildLife aims to provide essential medical care to children at imminent risk to life, according to the Foundation’s chairman, Iqbal Adamjee.

ChildLife Foundation, which treats over one million patients every year, believes that over the past five years it has been bringing about a quiet revolution in Karachi’s public health system, by upgrading the infrastructures and systems of the hospitals in which it operates.