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mission possible
While vacationing in Oaxaca, Mexico, last year, Matthew
Kaufman, MD, walked into the local hospital and began
introducing himself to the doctors. Still in vacation
mode, the chief resident in LIJ Medical Center’s Emergency
Department told them that he worked for an American healthcare
system that helped other medical centers and asked where they
needed support.
Recounting the story of a recent mudslide, the Mexican
physicians voiced their concerns about being unprepared in a
major crisis or natural disaster.
Impromptu Discussion
Spurs Emergency
Training Conference
“It’s a very interesting thing to go into a different culture with
different resources and see how they would handle this,” he said. Dr.
Kaufman immediately wanted to get involved. He had never gone on
medical mission before, but envied his colleagues’ medical missions.
When he returned home, Dr. Kaufman continued talking with
doctors and the Red Cross in Oaxaca, and
began building a North Shore-LIJ team
that could help the Mexican hospital better
prepare for a major crisis. Luckily for all,
LIJ is the site of an international emergency
medicine fellowship and Dario Gonzalez,
MD, the medical director for New York
City’s Office for Emergency Management
and associate medical director of the FDNY,
is a faculty member. Led by Dr. Gonzalez’s
expertise in disaster management, the
team included Gino Farina, MD; Herberth
Balsells, DO; and Kathryn Bailey, AB.
This January, the group traveled to
Oaxaca to conduct a needs assessment of
the hospitals that would be most vulnerable
in a disaster. The team also presented
an emergency management conference
that attracted nearly 400 participants,
including doctors, firefighters, emergency
medical technicians, Red Cross workers,
epidemiologists and military officials.
48 Summer 2012
“The conference itself was really an amazing event,” Dr.
Kaufman said. “I think it allowed attendees to evaluate their
own system in a critical way. I also see an opportunity for us to
continue this process and help to facilitate these changes.” Most
importantly, the event began a dialogue between agencies that had
not previously convened.
Emergency medicine specialists from North Shore-LIJ have
worked with hospitals in India, Haiti and other underdeveloped
countries that face such problems as poorly constructed facilities
or lack of formal training programs for doctors, said Mae Ward,
RN, senior research director of emergency medicine at North
Shore University Hospital. Sassan Naderi, MD, director of the
international emergency medicine fellowship at LIJ, had previously
arranged a three-year emergency medicine training program in
Durgapur, India.
This trip, however, was different because Oaxaca has the facilities
and the doctors, but needed the communication tools and
organizational structure to respond to a crisis. The response in
Oaxaca has been tremendous, Dr. Kaufman said, adding that medical
officials there have already started making changes. The initial
trip to Oaxaca was funded largely through a grant from Goldman
Sachs Gives, a donor-advised fund that gives grants to nonprofits.
As the project continues, there will be more trips to Oaxaca with
additional training exercises run by Dr. Kaufman and his team.
“I certainly intend to make this kind of project an ongoing
part of my career,” he said. “These projects are really exciting and
meaningful, especially because you can make systematic changes.”
North Shore-LIJ volunteers convened an emergency management conference in Oaxaca, Mexico.