Army Major develops training to help healthcare professionals combat coronavirus
The fight against coronavirus is something Army Major, Radiology Registrar and fellow of jHubMed, Georgina Blenkinsop, is passionate about supporting. Here’s her story.
The jHub is part of UK Strategic Command (which you can learn more about here ) and jHubMed is where the military develop cutting-edge innovations for the medical world.
When the coronavirus pandemic hit the UK, Major Georgina Blenkinsop, an Army Officer, Radiology Registrar and a fellow of jHubMed, had already been working to train military doctors in ways to help them do their jobs in difficult environments in the field.
When she spotted an opportunity to bring her skills to the fight against coronavirus, she took it.
Lung Ultrasound (also known as LUS) enables rapid health assessments of a patient’s condition. It also helps healthcare professionals decide whether their patients need further hospital treatment, or whether they can recover at home.
Understanding the important role that LUS can play in helping patients and those that treat them, the Major took action. Through her work, she had built up a contact network of some of the country’s best ultrasound specialists. Taking a collaborative approach with them, Major Blenkinsop and her team managed to create a high quality, freely available training programme in LUS for healthcare professionals in two weeks.
Speaking about what drove her and the project, Major Blenkinsop said:
“I believe that the future of healthcare training depends on working together across different medical specialties and management structures. Technology is key to making this a reality.”
The training programme was developed in conjunction with Health Education England, with the aim of training doctors and other healthcare professionals to use ultrasound machines when checking the lungs of patients with coronavirus.
LUS also allows for better care for patients already on ventilators in hospital, as the information from the ultrasound helps to provide a more accurate picture of the patient’s lung health.
To further support this work, Major Blenkinsop also wrote a guide for healthcare centres, to ensure they could use the training effectively.
The role and importance of this work, as Major Blenkinsop explains, is routed in innovation:
“This resource will help to transform healthcare delivery for Covid-19 patients, and it is thanks to my time in medical innovation at jHubMed that I was well placed to make this programme happen.”
With co-operation at its heart, people from across the medical world are working together to use these resources and deliver the very best care to patients, now and for the future.
The training is available for healthcare professionals to access through the e-Learning for Healthcare website.
