In December 2022, UW School of Veterinary Medicine faculty offered a first-of-its-kind training program for Emergency Management and Research Institute (EMRI) veterinarians in Hyderabad, India, called TEACH (Training in Emergency Animal Care and Handling).
Emeritus Professor Christopher Olsen, Assistant Professors Keith Poulsen and Ryan Breuer, and Adjunct Assistant Professor JR Lund led the training.
EMRI Green Health Services is India’s largest provider of pre-hospital medical services, serving over 800 million people with ambulances and other emergency services. In 2016, the program added ambulatory veterinary medical care in seven states in India.
TEACH builds on a long-time collaboration by Ann Evensen, a UW-Madison professor of family medicine and community health, with EMRI to provide instruction in Basic and Advanced Life Support in Obstetrics (BLSO, ALSO®) to physicians and emergency medical technicians.
The TEACH program has been under development since 2019 but was slowed by COVID travel restrictions. With a Memorandum of Agreement now in place between UW-Madison and EMRI, the team launched TEACH with a three-and-a-half-day train-the-trainer program.
The training consisted of didactic, case-based, laboratory and on-farm training for 22 EMRI veterinarians from around India. Topics included fluid therapy, blood transfusions, calving and calf management, dystocia, metritis, transfer of passive immunity, vaccinology, musculoskeletal trauma and physical examination, as well as One Health, zoonotic influenza and lumpy skin disease.
Two EMRI veterinarians will visit the UW School of Veterinary Medicine in March 2023 to better understand veterinary medical education and practice in the U.S.
Future goals for the TEACH program include:
- Instituting monthly virtual case rounds with EMRI and SVM veterinarians
- Building a library of video lectures on clinical care and zoonotic disease topics
- Yearly or biannual in-person training of EMRI veterinarians and paraveterinarians in India by SVM veterinarians
- Assisting EMRI in designing an on-site teaching herd and veterinary medical clinical skills and simulation center