Resident Academic Day: Humility and Obstetric Hemorrhage

Yesterday we completed our final Academic Day with the Rwandan residents here in Kigali. It’s been a tremendous honour to spend time with this passionate group of people, who despite incredible odds, are persevering at delivering high quality anesthesia care. I’ve never met a more engaged, enthusiastic group during a teaching session, and our various approaches to teaching were heartily welcomed. A highlight is always Anesthesia Jeopardy, where trivia relevant to the week’s teaching is covered, complete with cheers and (many!) jeers from the opposing team. It’s an understatement to say that they residents "really" get into it. 

This week’s topic was obstetric hemorrhage - an important topic to cover in a country where maternal mortality remains at 210/100,000 live births (compared to just 7 in Canada), and postpartum hemorrhage (PPH) remains a significant cause of morbidity and mortality. Throughout my time here, I’ve striven to understand some of the causes at the heart of the issue. 

Following medical school, graduates work as General Practitioners (GPs) in rural hospitals; there, they are responsible for all manner of obstetric care, including Caesarian sections, amongst other routine medical and surgical care. Formally trained Obstetricians are not readily available (there is a severe shortage across the country) and when these GPs run into issues with PPH or massive obstetric hemorrhage, they are often left to deal on their own. Add to that the incredibly limited supply of blood available for transfusion and stock-outs of common medications used to treat hemorrhage, and you have a perfect storm of factors leading to unnecessary loss of life. 

In Kigali and Butare, two larger cities where the majority of anesthesia residents in Rwanda train, doctors receive patients transferred in from these rural District Hospitals for further management. Often these patients are still actively bleeding and are in a critical state. Yesterday, one resident discussed at length how she had spent much of the day and night last week dealing with one massive obstetric hemorrhage case after the next - something that would be unheard of in Canada. The cases that the resident described represent some of the worst PPH a Western physician may see in their careers, and here we have residents trying to manage these patients in challenging, under-resourced settings with only limited backup. 

The irony was not lost on me that our Academic Day was spent teaching residents about a topic they have far more experience in dealing with than I ever will (hopefully!). What’s amazing is that the group was so interested in hearing about "my own" experiences and what I would do in their situation - coming from a major tertiary care hospital in downtown Toronto, seemingly endless resources and assistance is available when I need it. That’s not, nor will it likely be the case here anytime soon. The more time I spend in Rwanda, the more I realize how important it is to tailor our teaching to the clinical context in which we are working. While there may be gold standard treatments and buckets of evidence demonstrating one approach over another, we must think creatively how that may apply in different environments. At the end of the day, I couldn’t help but think that it was truly I that received the bulk of the education.

Residents matching PPH treatment cards at academic day