Quebec doctors are providing virtual training for Ukrainian health-care workers

A group of Quebec doctors is offering training on life-saving procedures to Ukrainians contending with the Russian invasion.

McGill University in Montreal says the Steinberg Centre for Simulation and Interactive Learning is creating multimedia content to support urgent health-care needs in Ukraine.

A news release says trauma surgeon Dr. Dan Deckelbaum, who is the surgical and procedural skills director at McGill's Steinberg Centre, recorded a series of video tutorials with co-workers after he was contacted by colleagues in Ukraine.

"This kind of hostile environment falls on the shoulders of a large number of health-care workers,"Deckelbaumsaid in an interview with The Canadian Press. "These videos can play a vital role in ensuring procedures are followed to the best of one's ability."

The school says the videos were filmed in a simulated operating room and translated from English to Ukrainian.

The videos teach basic life-support techniques and emergency life-saving procedures that can be performed by non-surgeons, including chest-tube insertion and airway ventilatory management.

"If you're a cardiologist or a dermatologist, you're a very good doctor, but you don't know how to treat an injury because it's not your area of expertise," Deckelbaum said. "We created these videos with the simulation centre to show how to perform these procedures in emergency medicine to treat trauma."

Dr. Gerald Fried, director of the Steinberg Centre, says the teams were able to deliver the training material in less than 24 hours.

Dr. Junko Tokuno, a thoracic surgeon who helped produce these videos, has been working for the past six months to develop visual training for McGill medical students. She says this experience helped her quickly gather content when the request came.

"In these situations where several patients are in danger, doctors don't have time to refer to a book," she said. "The videos show exactly how the procedures should be done, with visual and auditory aid."

Tokuno says these videos are easy to stream anywhere in Ukraine, provided electricity and internet are available.

"There is a considerable number of injuries every day," she said. "Resources are limited, the number of doctors who know how to care for seriously injured patients is limited. We need doctors who know how to save lives."