Global Health

Dr. Ilyas Tugtekin, a consultant anesthetist from Ulm University Medical Center in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, travels to Kumasi, Ghana to help establish an ultrasound training center for doctors all over West Africa. 

The following is a letter from Dr. Samuel Abelson, an emergency medicine physician who lives in Minneapolis.

Four years ago, Project Medishare began teaching point-of-care ultrasound to the staff at Hospital Bernard Mevs in Port Au Prince. Through the Sonosite Global Health program, we have borrowed multiple loaner machines to use in teaching.

Schistosomiasis, a disease that is common in sub-Saharan Africa, is particularly widespread in Madagascar. The Schistosoma mansoni parasite responsible for the disease is linked to fibrotic changes in the liver which can be detected using point-of-care ultrasound. Dr. Hannah Russell described how point-of-care ultrasound was put to the test in remote locations during an expedition to study the disease in Malagasy school children.

by Dr. Ben LaBrot, founder of Floating Doctors

As of this writing, my wife is pregnant with our first child, and the novelty has long since worn off.  After looking after so many other people’s pregnancies, it’s a novel experience to be on the other end of the ultrasound probe, as it were. 

Medical imaging offers life-saving insights into patient health—and perhaps no other imaging modality is more versatile and mobile than point-of-care ultrasound. 

In a fascinating dispatch from the Kurdish city of Duhok in northern Iraq, Dr. Christine Butts describes how point-of-care ultrasound is an indispensable tool for emergency physicians, especially when patients arrive unconscious and with no indication of an obvious malady.

Point-of-care ultrasound is a valuable tool for successful dialysis fistula surgery, allowing pre-operative mapping to find a suitable site and post operative fistula scanning to check for stenosis and adequate blood flow. 

Anna Jerram, a clinical vascular scientist at the Manchester Royal Infirmary, discusses the role POC ultrasound played during a recent trip to The Gambia to provide critical fistula surgery to patients. 

During the Summer of 2017, a group of healthcare professionals – the majority from the Hospital Clínico Universitario Virgen de la Arrixaca (HCUVA) in Murcia, Spain – travelled to Kenya in partnership with the Spanish NGO Cirugía Solidaria.

They brought along surgical equipment – from beds to lamps to scalpels – to create a first-rate hospital set-up, most of which was donated by HCUVA. 

Dr. Alfredo Tirado is from Florida Hospital in Orlando, and has been leading an emergency response mission in Puerto Rico to help with Hurricane Maria relief.