Caribbean Course on Emergency Care and Treatment

In many Caribbean countries, it is common that ambulances responding to accidents with a large number of casualties have no formally-trained medical technicians on board. Other agencies, such as police and fire services, also may arrive first at the emergency or disaster site, yet many of their personnel lack training on how to handle these situations. For many years, countries have expressed the need for a simple but formal course for all first responders. Therefore, in collaboration with many emergency medical technicians and Caribbean and U.S. doctors, PAHO has developed an emergency care and treatment course (ECAT) for the Caribbean.

The course, which is available on CD-ROM, addresses basic medical response for disaster and emergency situations. The course includes a participant’s manual, tips for the instructors, a PowerPoint presentation and review tests. Participants will benefit most from this new course if they are familiar with other PAHO courses on mass casualty management and incident command systems.

A limited number of copies of both the CD-ROM and the print participant’s manual can be requested from disaster-publications@paho.org. The contents of the course are also available online at www.disaster-info.net/carib/.

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