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Emergency Care Saves Lives
25x25
WHO
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Credits
Initiative aiming to provide access to Basic Emergency Care training for nurses and midwives from 25 countries by the end of 2025.
The Disease Control Priorities project (2018) estimates that more than half of deaths and a third of disability in low- and middle-income countries could be addressed by effective emergency care. Injuries alone killed 4.4 million people around the world in 2019, and constitute 8% of all deaths.
Health emergencies happen every day, everywhere. Emergency care is required to respond to a wide range of conditions in children and adults – including injuries, infections, heart attacks and strokes, asthma and complications of pregnancy.
Emergency care providers save lives. Yet in resource-limited settings, care is often compromised by a lack of training. This can result in a failure to recognize urgency, provide initial appropriate care, and a delay in onward referrals.
The result can be catastrophic, with research showing that over half of all annual deaths, and over a third of disability in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) result from conditions that could be treated by trained emergency care professionals.
The need for high quality training
The workforce is the backbone of any health system, with nurses and midwives playing a key role in the management of emergency medical situations. Yet the availability and quality of emergency care training for these health professionals varies widely– with many countries offering little formal training or none at all. Where courses do exist, materials are often limited in scope, high in cost and unsuitable for use in low-resource settings.
Open-access training course for frontline healthcare providers who manage acute illness and injury with limited resources.
A short course that makes a big difference
Launched in 2016, the Basic Emergency Care (BEC) course was developed by the World Health Organization, the International Committee of the Red Cross and International Federation for Emergency Medicine. It is designed to help health-care workers manage acute life-threatening conditions in any health care facility, anywhere in the world.
Open source and free to access, the course includes a combination of lectures, case scenarios and hands-on skills sessions to teach a systematic (ABCDE) approach to emergency care – with modules focused on life-saving interventions for acutely ill patients suffering trauma, difficulty in breathing, shock and altered mental status.
Today, over 15 000 health care providers in 60 countries have received BEC training. Yet uptake among nurses and midwives – who represent 59% of the global health workforce – is low, with numbers trained estimated at just 25% of total participants.
WHO / Matt Dolan
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Credits
He was the first person I saved after being trained in the Basic Emergency Care course (…) We placed an oral airway and gave him supplemental oxygen. Two hours later he regained consciousness.
Halimah Adam, Uganda / Recipient of the Basic Emergency Care Training
How to get started with BEC
Country Stories