About The Event
150
Participants Trained
279
Patients Scanned
A team of ASE Foundation volunteers traveled to northern Vietnam to provide clinical care for patients in rural villages as well as participate in an exchange of educational lectures and training with local clinicians at the Vietnam National Heart Institute, Bach Mai Hospital. Echocardiography is only available at centers in major cities, so outreach events to rural villages is already part of the standard practice of the major teaching hospitals in Vietnam.
The event’s core components were to teach local clinicians how to use laptop size echo platforms in resource poor settings and to establish the use of focused cardiac ultrasound in resource poor areas of Vietnam.
Highlights
In Vietnam, physicians do the patient scanning. The 75 cardiologists at Bach Mai see 500 outpatients and 450 inpatients daily, performing 70,000 echocardiograms a year. The hospital’s nursing school graduates 500 nurses each year who manage the day-today operations at the clinics.
Vietnam-America Cardiac Ultrasound Symposium
Over 130 physicians from Bach Mai and its sister provincial hospitals attended the full day symposium, which was sponsored by Mindray. The team presented lectures covering topics ranging from “Basic Echo Knobology” to “Imaging for Structural Heart Disease Interventions” which the Bach Mai staff translated into Vietnamese.
Intro to Echo
Our team worked closely with a group of 8 nurses to train them in basic image acquisition. Teaching them to recognize abnormal versus normal in a broad sense will help them triage patients. Another 45 clinicians were also with us observing.
Donated Resources
Mindray generously provided six M7 ultrasound machines which the team used for training. They also donated an M7 System, a crucial gift that will further the week’s training and clinical efforts long after our team leaves Ha Noi. Our team gifted the hospital ASE's complete guidelines poster set, which were all framed and hung on the echo lab walls the very next day.
Rural Outreach
The team traveled to Dong Anh, outside Hanoi, to the Xuan Cahn Commune Health Station and scanned 279 elderly patients. Patients arrived at the clinic by motorbike, bicycle, and on foot where tarps were set up to protect everyone from the sun. Each patient was first scanned by one of the nurses we trained the day before, who assessed normal versus abnormal. Our team members then followed with their own scan and assessment.
Participants & Collaborators
The 13 volunteers consisted of physicians, sonographers, translators and Mindray representatives, listed below. Our team worked closely with Vietnam National Heart Institute, Bach Mai Hospital Team Leaders: Prof. Do Doan Loi, MD, PhD; Nguyen Thi Thu Hoai, MD, PhD; and Tuan Le Thanh, MD. We are also honored to have spent time with Prof. Pham Gia Khai, the person responsible for first bringing echocardiography to Vietnam in the early 1970s, and president of the Vietnam Heart Association!
Team Leaders
Jose Banchs, MD, FASE
James Kirkpatrick, MD, FASE
Team Members
David Adams, RCS, RDCS, FASE
Rebecca Hahn, MD, FASE
Jill Inafuku, BS, RDMS, FASE
Thanh Kirkpatrick, MD, MPH
Tu Nguyen
Rachel Quang, RDCS
Liza Sanchez, RCS, FASE
William Song
Nova Sprague, BS, RDCS
Kin Wen
Andrea Van Hoever
Partners In Care
The ASE Foundation thanks our partners for this event, Vietnam National Heart Institute, Bach Mai Hospital, and Mindray.
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