COOL Training in Primary Trauma Care
Increasing the number of health workers trained in treating trauma and musculoskeletal impairment in East, Central and Southern Africa.
©
University of Oxford
PTC has made me help and save lives of trauma patients
- Training course participant
The COOL programme ran over 50 Primary Trauma Care courses in COSECSA countries 2012-2016 (around five in each country), in partnership with Primary Trauma Care Foundation together with COSECSA representatives, PTC local organising committees and numerous local and UK volunteer instructors.
December 2012 - March 2017:
- 50+ PTC provider courses have been delivered across 9 COSECSA countries
- 2000+ health professionals from 160+ district and referral hospitals have been trained in PTC
- 550+ new local PTC instructors have been trained.
- 110+ senior UK and COSECSA doctors have been involved delivering PTC training.
Primary Trauma Care (PTC) Courses
Trauma Training in COSECSA countries
TRAINING REPORTS
COURSE OUTLINE
The training has really been very useful to me and I would recommend that more health workers are trained , especially in developing countries with the poor state of roads and transport systems
- Training course participant
The Primary Trauma Care course has been developed for emergency trauma care and prevention in settings with limited or no access to high-tech facilities. The PTC course takes two days and is followed by the instructor course which lasts one day. The new instructors are then invited to lead a second two-day PTC course, coached by the original team. In total, for those who become instructors, this 2-1-2 pattern lasts a total five days. The course is aimed at all levels of health workers and first responders and in new areas it usually begins with senior doctors.
Fully revised and updated Primary Trauma Care Manuals were published in February 2015.
Developing Training Capacity
The initial PTC courses in each COSECSA country were organised and led by teams of experienced PTC instructors and local faculty, in coordination with COSECSA representatives, followed by a transition to local PTC committees in each country who are prioritising and organising subsequent courses to cascade the training in each country, with the aim of reaching areas in most need of trauma training. Inter-COSECSA country exchange of trainers was encouraged to strengthen regional partnerships and consistency in training.
Training Outcomes
We reported our findings on the educational and clinical outcomes of the trauma training in these peer-reviewed publications:
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Do trauma courses change practice? A qualitative review of 20 courses in East, Central and Southern Africa (2017) Injury
- Delivering trauma training to multiple health-worker cadres in nine sub-Saharan African countries: lessons learnt from the COOL programme. (2015) The Lancet
- How useful are Primary Trauma Care courses in sub-Saharan Africa? (2015) Injury
- A related publication is Are Primary Trauma Care (PTC) courses beneficial in low- and middle-income countries - A systematic review (2019) Injury, by Murtaza Kadhum, one of our Oxford academic foundation doctors.