The Amalthea Trust ran two more online sessions in February for Evelyn Hone College BME students in Lusaka, Zambia. Both online workshops were facilitated by THET, our partners on the Zambia Program.
The first session took place on Friday 11th February 2022, and was once again undertaken from the BME workshops at Hilditch Group. The topic was Electro-Surgical Diathermy, and the students at the other end of the Zoom link were in the capable hands of Mr Ray Emslie, a veteran volunteer of ours and retired Head of Biomedical Engineering at Colchester Hospital. Ray was ably assisted by Andy Barrow, another experienced volunteer and Head of Biomedical Engineering at Kent Hospitals NHS Trust.
The second online practical was exactly one week later, on Friday 18th February, and this time Jas Bilkhu (Ex-New Cross Hospital, Wolverhampton and our Program Manager for Kyambogo, Uganda) spent the morning on Ultrasound, whilst Lewis Brazier and Andy Barrow (both from Kent Hospitals NHS Trust) did an in-depth afternoon on fault-finding and maintenance for Baxter Infusion Pumps.
Both one day practical workshops were videoed by THET so that they can be used by Evelyn Hone College for years to come in their teaching, and all through both sessions the students in Lusaka were very engaged and asked a lot of pertinent questions.
Although this format of using a Zoom link for practical sessions will never entirely replace in-person training it is nevertheless here to stay as an important aspect of our work. It is, after all, a very cheap and effective way of passing on practical experience to the new generation of Biomedical Engineers in Low Resource settings, and although we plan to be once again sending our volunteers out into the field later this year, I feel sure that we will continue with these online training sessions as a useful addition to what we do.