Advanced disaster training discussed in medical forum

The opening of the 5th Sino-Luso International Medical Forum today heralds a new level of advanced medical disaster training for over 175 of Macau’s local healthcare providers.
The start of the three day forum began with a press briefing led by Dr. Manson Fok, Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at the Macau University of Sciences and Technology (MUST), and special guests speakers Dr. Susan Briggs, Director of the International Trauma and Disaster Institute at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Roy Alson the United States’ government’s specialty disaster medical assistance teams, and Dr. Chow Yuk-yin, Vice-President of the Hong Kong Association for Conflict and Catastrophe Medicine.
Dr. Fok told the Macau Daily Times, “Touch wood we have not had such disasters here in Macau, but with this new training we will be ready for the worst. Our guests from Harvard will help us learn from September 11, Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake. Dr Briggs has also been working with China since 1986 to develop medical exchanges, so she brings a lot of knowledge to the table.”
Dr. Briggs added that, “training the trainers is the most important elements of what we do now. We must also focus on communications and security with disaster preparedness. It is a top down operation, like what we saw in the Sichuan earthquake. For us there, they did not need doctors, they had that. What they wanted was help with rehabilitation, particularly with amputation victims. When our team came to the West China Hospital in Chengdu, we were surprised that children and parents were being treated together, so it really was a community spirit.”
Dr. Briggs further told the MDTimes that, “We hope to bring a spirit of cooperation so it does not matter if a doctor is from China, or America, or Iran or Brazil, but we all are reading from the same playbook and to build multidisciplinary teams.”
Of particular note for the Sino-Luso spirit in Macau is Dr. Briggs’ training manual titled, “Advanced Disaster Medical Response manual for providers.” She brought the Portuguese language edition to Macau as a token of respect with the title “Manual de resposta medica avançada em desastres.”
It has also been released in a dozen other languages.
Dr. Briggs said, “When the Fukushima incident occurred, the Japanese government asked about our nuclear response chapter in a word file so they
could send it to all doctors in Japan.”
They will use it as a manual in their course at the Faculty of Health Sciences at the Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST) in all-day workshops on January 13 and 14.
This is the 5th Sino-Luso International Medical Forum organized by Dr. Manson Fok and the MUST Faculty of Health Sciences since May of 2011.