Emergency Medicine

Vietnam Emergency Medicine Development

The Good Samaritans came to Hue in 2002 with a small primary care team providing medical care to the poorest of the poor. The following year the team added a small group of specialists to provide consults for the primary care team and also to begin a teaching program at Hue College of Medicine and Pharmacy. This was the second objective of the Team's Mission. The initial groups of specialists represented various medical and surgical specialties including world renown specialists such as Hepatologist and Dean of Mayo Medical School, Dr. Keith Lindor.

In 2004 Dr. Carter Hill, a member of the Specialty Team, gave the very first EM lecture to an audience of about 4 doctors and nurses from his laptop. Since then Dr. Carter Hill has been a champion for EM, recruiting everyone he could to come to Hue to help develop the little Emergency Room. In 2005 Dr. Heather Crane spent several months at the College working in the ER followed by Dr. Tin Do for another 3 months in 2006 and again the program was followed up by Dr. Heather Crane, Tammi Thomas, Debbie Washke of Loma Linda University and Dr. Sam Cloud in that Summer.

With those early experiences by our EM Specialists, by the end of 2006, the team recognized that the greatest needs at that time going forward was training in Emergency Medicine. There was no EM specialty, no formal training program any where in the country. Physicians working in the ER were just there to pass the time until their time was up or something better came along. Seeing these tremendous needs, the Good Samaritans organized a separate EM team in the spring of 2007 and put on the first EM Conference at Hue College of Medicine with the participation of Drs. Carter Hill, Sam Cloud, Graham Nichol and Richard Guth. The very first formal team of EM Specialists had come to Vietnam to begin a new chapter in Emergency Medicine Development.

From then on each year the team and participants grew a little bigger and in 2009, the team pondered the idea of going "national". Later that year, by no co-incidence, Dr. Sam Cloud met Dr. Joe Lex over dinner in Buffalo, New York and the conversation started flowing about Vietnam and EM. Dr. Lex, a Vietnam Veteran, became intensely interested. Fully aware of Dr. Lex's international EM credentials, the small EM leadership team invited Dr. Lex to be the 2010 Conference Chairman and things just exploded from there. Noted physicians such as Drs. Peter Cameron, Bob Suter, Kris Arnold, Howard Blumstein, Terry Mulligan and a host of Residency Directors came under the recruitment of Dr. Lex for the first National EM Symposium.

In March 2010, sixty physicians came to Vietnam with 4 ambitious programs.

1. The Deans' Conference, co-chaired by Drs. Tamara Thomas and Kris Arnold, discussed the formation of an EM training program.

2. The Symposium, chaired by Dr. Lex, trained 200 physicians and built interests in an otherwise unrecognized specialty.

3. The EMS/Disaster Conference, chair by Dr. Graham Nichol and hosted by Thua Thien Department of Health began the discussion of coordinated EMS and disaster managemnt.

4. The First Nursing Conference, chaired by Michele Suter, RN, learned the Vietnamese nursing system and introduced the skills of US trained nurses.

Out of these ambitious agendas, the Vietnamese leadership signed a consensus statement to begin the establishment of Emergency Medicine as the new specialty. A new star is born in Southeast Asia.

It was also at the end of this conference that a seed of forming a national organization to carry on the work of EM was planted in Dr. Trang Tran, the Director of the ED at Hue Central Hospital. In fertile soil, that seed started to grow.

The EM leadership committee recognized that to be successful at the National level, in-country physicians must be part of the vision, design and implementation process. In October 2010, four physicians representing the leadership from the 3 regions of Vietnam came to ACEP in Las Vegas where they actively planned the 2011 Symposium. They decided on the "Train-the-Trainer" model and they themselves became the first Vietnamese faculty of the team. The Three-Quarter of the remaining faculty would be physicians from team 2010 coming back. a testament to the amazing work that is taking place in Vietnam.

In March 2011, under Dr. Trang Tran's skillful leadership, three more conferences were organized at Hue Central Hospital.

1. The International Conference on EM was chaired by the Prof. Nguyen Thi Xuyen, the Deputy Minister of Health with assistance of the third ranking member of the MoH, Dr. Khue Vu, Director of Examination and Treatment Department.

2. The EM Symposium, chaired by Dr. James Holmes, trained 60 EM / Critical Care physicians.

3. Nursing Conference, chaired by Mickey Guerrero, RN trained 80 nurses from throughout the Thua Thien Hue province.

Emotions ran high at the end of the International Conference. The practicing EM physicians cried out for more formal training and recognition. The Vietnamese leadership heard that cry and voted to begin the process of forming an Emergency Medicine Society. This society would be the vehicle in which standardized EM training would take shape and be disseminated throughout the country in future years.

The small seed sown in fertile ground is now being watered today. The next chapter of EM for Vietnam is to be written in March 2012.