From left, Navin Thakur, Arvind Chandrakantan, Bhampa Rai, Mihir Meghani and Basudev
Khannal
COMMUNITY NEWS
HAF physicians help
Bhutanese refugees in Nepal
SUMAN GUHA MOZUMDER
As part of the Hindu American Physicians in Seva program, two physicians from the Hindu American Foundation visited Nepal to assess
the health and medical needs of Bhutanese refugees,
about 50,000 of whom are still living in United
Nations High Commission for Refugees camps.
Dr Arvind Chandrakantan, HAF executive council
member who visited Damak, Nepal, with Dr Mihir
Meghani, HAF board member and co-founder of
HAPiS, said the medical care provided in the
UNHCR camps is by and large very good.
“Nonetheless, there are gaps in service and we
want to assist by providing medical volunteers from
the US,” Chandrakantan said. “Our idea is to have a
small group of medical providers to be able to meet
selected needs of the refugee population. We were
actually quite impressed with the UN administration
of the camps, and met many UN officials and what
we want to do is to supplement and supplant the
care that is currently being provided.”
The UNHCR camps house Hindu and Buddhist
refugees of Nepali descent — many of whom had
been settled in Bhutan for over 100 years — who
were stripped of their citizenship and forced to leave
Bhutan in the 1990s under the ‘One Nation, One
People’ policy. More than 100,000 Bhutanese
refugees, most of them Hindus, have been living in
camps in Nepal since their expulsion from Bhutan
nearly 20 years ago. The Bhutanese government has
refused to allow the refugees to return but in recent
years a number of countries have agreed to resettle
them, including the United States. Approximately
35,000 live in the US.
The story behind Stanford’s 911-style system in India
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structured similarly to optimize resources and time, and
allow for the simultaneous instruction of both students and
instructor- trainees.
The curriculum also included standardized international
training courses like advanced cardiac life support, pedi-
atric advanced life support and international trauma life
support.
Stanford researchers studied the ACLS test performance
of 117 PGPEC students with 43 US paramedic students,
and found the Indian students’ average test score was 86
percent (+/- 11 percent), while students in the US scored 87
percent (+/- 6 percent). The study found that, despite
English being the third language for 75 percent of the
PGPEC students, they performed at a level equivalent to
their US counterparts on the ACLS written tests.
The instructors also experimented with incorporating
non-traditional subjects into the prehospital educational
curriculum. The PGPEC students participated in a two-
week curriculum focusing on leadership, communication,
team-building and personal confidence. After its comple-
tion, the PGPEC students reported significant improve-
ment in their leadership and communication skills.
The PGPEC curriculum also included hospital-based
rotations in emergency medicine, intensive care, coronary
care, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics and burns. The
PGPEC students were supervised by ACEs and hospital-
based physicians during these clinical rotations.
For the final six months of the program, the students
were assigned to field training locations throughout India.
At the completion of this field training, the students
returned to Hyderabad for final oral examinations (case-
based) given by the ACEs and Stanford faculty. July 16,
Dr S V Mahadevan, left, at the Center for South Asia, Stanford University, March 13
2009, after two grueling years of training, the first batch of
PGPEC students graduated. They have gone on to work as
paramedics, EMT instructors, researchers, and physician
extenders all across India.
Over six years, Stanford has sent 32 instructors, emer-
gency medicine faculty members, fellows, residents, stu-
dents, US-trained paramedics, and nurses to teach emer-
gency medicine at the EMRI campus in Hyderabad.
“In July 2009, we turned over complete responsibility for
the paramedic-training program to the ACEs and the
EMRI staff, a defining moment in Indian EMS education,”
said Mahadevan. “It was our sincere hope that the EMRI-
Stanford paramedic program would serve as a replicable
paradigm for the development of sustainable educational
courses elsewhere in India and in other developing
nations.”
The EMRI’s service, which is funded by a public-private
partnership between GVK and the state governments, has
spread to almost 11 states in India and is likely to expand to
more states.
