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Paediatric life support courses for health centres in low and middle income countries
  1. Tom Lissauer1,
  2. Elizabeth Molyneux2
  1. 1Imperial College London, Centre for International Child Health, London, UK
  2. 2Department of Paediatrics, College of Medicine, Blantyre, Malawi
  1. Correspondence to Dr Tom Lissauer, Imperial College London, Centre for International Child Health, London W2 1PG, UK; t.lissauer{at}imperial.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1136/emermed-2016-205985

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    Paediatric life support courses are increasingly advocated and used to rapidly train healthcare professionals in low and middle income countries in the recognition and management of sick children.1 Widely used courses are Helping Babies Breathe2 for neonatal resuscitation and, rather confusingly, the ETAT (Emergency Triage and Treatment)3 and ETAT+ (Emergency Triage and Treatment plus Admission)4 courses.

    ETAT is a WHO course, originally aimed at health professionals in district hospitals, and is based on the Integrated Management of Childhood Illness guidelines. The course is modular, and lasts about 16 h. ETAT+, developed in Kenya, is a more comprehensive course lasting 5 days and covers the 10 most common causes of hospital admission in East Africa. It includes one and a half days on the newborn infant and an introduction to quality improvement. Both courses include lectures and scenario-based teaching and a formal assessment of knowledge and clinical skills. They are both periodically updated.

    Improved knowledge and clinical skills have been demonstrated following both the ETAT and ETAT+ courses of facility-based health professionals5 ,6 and medical students.7 The EMJ paper by Kapoor et al8 describes how they used the ETAT course for primary health centre staff in Latin America. They translated the course into …

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    Footnotes

    • Contributors Original draft written by TL, which was modified by EM.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

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