Wisam Al-Basaam

Extraordinary tales of ordinary heroism.

While at the CICM ASM in Sydney I was introduced to a gentleman called Wisam Al-Basaam and he had a story to tell. When I say gentleman I really mean gentleman. Wisam is a consultant intensivist at the Austin Hospital. That is a pretty good job. It’s a very good hospital and most of us would be very happy to get a gig there. For Wisam the road to the Austin was serpentine, three countries, three systems, war, death, terror, trauma, uncertainty, adversity, hard work and ultimately a new start. 

A new start here in Australia. Wisam is very highly respected by his peers in a super high performing clinician in an elite ICU. (I know this because those peers told me as much.) Australia is lucky to have him. He feels lucky to be here but the people that access his public hospital ICU are also lucky. Every moment that I experience the best of the free services we have here in Australia I feel lucky. Free emergency and intensive care services are common and usually excellent here in Australia. It is not the same for every specialty and I am proud to work in the part of a system that does not require people to pay up front just because they are sick and need healthcare.

I get paid. Wisam and all the other doctors and nurses that worked like him in Iraq often didn’t get paid. He shares just a few stories from his early post-graduate years when his country didn’t even have a government. No one got paid. And yet they worked. They worked in a dangerous environment with little or no support and little or no equipment.

Wisam didn’t think of his story as exceptional. Unfortunately his story is not exceptional. But that doesn’t stop him being a hero. A role model.

He is the sort of Australian that makes me feel like I want to be part of this country. 

Thank you Wisam. Thanks for sharing your talents, your story and your hard earned wisdom.

Thank you also to Rahim Alhaj and Amjad Ali Khan, playing the aptly named Common Destination from their album Ancient Sounds. You can find that on iTunes. I found it on Soundcloud.

JB 82 Wisam Al Basaam

Jellybeans with Dr Doug Lynch, poorly differentiated doctor and pathological polymath.
Emergency Medicine. Critical Care. Aeromedical Retrieval. Remote Area Medicine. Resource Poor Medicine. Disaster Medicine. Conflict Medicine. Ethics. Politics. Life. Death.
These podcasts are atypical interviews with persons of interest.
Critical conversations with Critical Carers. Carers like you.
The people that listen to this podcast are insiders, movers, shakers and, I suspect, every listener is potentially a future interviewee.
Each conversation is a story shared that has at least one hidden lesson.
This is not straight forward #FOAMed (Free Open Access Medical Education.
This is about the people behind #FOAMed, their ideals, their victories, their failures, their thoughts.
What we do in our working lives is, on the good days, the best job in the world.
What we do in our working lives is, on the bad days, one of the worst jobs in the world. 
I am just a human and so are you. I need to be reminded of why I put myself through all this, why I tolerate the damage to me, my life, my health, my family. I need to be inspired and re-inspired almost everyday. 
The Jellybeans exist because the people I talk to are inspiring, they are fascinating and they are funny.
The Jellybean Podcast is has been around since before the first SMACC conference. We have been at every one. We have been a lot of places. We talk with interesting people in the Critical Care Medical World or on the fringes of it. We do this everywhere and anywhere. We speak to world leaders and front liners, we speak to paramedics, nurses, academics, researchers, students, the quiet achievers and the rock stars.
Its about the quality of the conversation not the quality of the audio.
Please visit www.TheTopEnd.org
Contact via Twitter @TheTopEnd
Jellybeans are available on www.Lifeinthefastlane.com and www.IntensiveCareNetwork.com

Jellybean Jelly Bean Jellybeans Jellybeanz Beanboozled TopEnd TheTopEnd DougLynch

With a bizarre side interest in Baggage or more accurately an interest in Less Baggage.
www.LessBaggage.org
Twitter and Instagram @LessBaggage
Pinterest LessBaggage

Science

Annet Alenyo Ngabirano. 

(That's Annet on the right in the photo with Kat Evans on the left and Mulinda Nyirenda in the middle.)

Emergency Medicine in the Uganda, the pearl of Africa.

Annet presented at dasSMACC and has become a huge personality in the the developing community of emergency medicine in the continent of Africa. While we associate Annet with Uganda she is really an Adventurer, on an adventure that goes beyond the borders of any country.

This is a wonderful insight into the curious journey of one special person. It stretches from Mbarara to Berlin, from South Africa to Sydney. There is much to learn and at every step there are surprises.

Annet found out so much about her own system through her normal training (normal for Mbarara) but also through personal tragedies. Her journey has turned her mind to things that she hadn’t thought of, she learned new practical skills and she even learned to ride a bike. 

Dr Alenyo Ngabirano is interested in research but she is interested in research that asks the right questions. We all are but I cannot tell you what the right questions are for any sub-specialty and you cannot tell Annet what the right questions are for Ugandan Emergency Medicine.

Uganda is a country in which emergency medicine is only emerging. What exactly do we need to build? What exactly do we have? How do we even find that out?

There seems to be an increased effort by the FOAM / FOAMed community to spread the useful stuff around, spread the love, spread it beyond the big FOAMed three; USA, Australia and UK. That is not as simple as it sounds. We have to try to avoid all the mistakes that have been made in the past, this is not an opportunity to feel good about ourselves and the good thing we do. What we should do is listen to the people on the ground. Listen to the locals. Do the appropriate research. Support the people that are there and that will stay there. Figure out what we know and what we need to find out. Annet realises that even she needs to know more about the system in Uganda and she knows more about it than you ever could.

CODAchange wants to step into this space. It won’t be easy. There will be many opportunities to mess things up. To start with maybe we just need to talk to our colleagues in other places. It is about relationships. Take an interest. Find out more. Maybe even go and see for yourself but go there to learn stuff rather going there with some idea that you can tell people what to do. 

Annet and I talk a about AFEM, the African Federation for Emergency Medicine ( aka Fedération Africaine de Médicine d’Urgence ) which is a fast growing pan-African organisation that works to ensure the development of collaborative, comprehensive, and cross-cutting emergency care systems in Africa. Check out their projects. Have look at their Handbook, available from Oxford University Press and everywhere. The second edition is out recently. The first edition had the same look as the legendary Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine. (I still have my first copy of that book, feeling a little bit nostalgic just considering that.)

https://afem.africa/what-we-do/

https://afem.africa/project/afem-handbook-of-acute-and-emergency-care/

Their next conference, the African Conference on Emergency Medicine (AfCEM) is in Mombasa, Kenya in November 2020. Why not go there? Why not show these guys respect and contribute to the growth of their conference and federation simply by attending as a delegate? Why not go one step further and Support a Delegate at the same time? The Support a Delegate appeal at dasSMACC was very successful. But it was not a one off. There are still conferences, there are still under-funded delegates. Please do not forget this practical and ultra-tangible way of lending a helping hand.

Jellybean 110 Emergency Medicine in Uganda with Annet Alenyo

The little audio clips at the beginning and the end are topical. The actor and singer Seu Jorge is a Brazilian legend. Having shot to international recognition in the 2002 movie "City of God/Cidade de Deus" he has become a huge figure in Samba. This track is a cover of the Bowie classic "Oh! You pretty things" as performed for the Wes Anderson masterpiece "The Life Aquatic". Both movies are recommended as is the associated album "The Life Aquatic, The studio sessions featuring Seu Jorge".

Jellybean 109 A snapshot from Rio with @DucSchub

At the last SMACC event in Sydney the Brazilians turned up in force. It was impressive. They came to learn but quickly it became apparent that we should be learning from them too. I won’t pretend to be a SoMe expert but I have never come across such sophisticated use of Instagram as a #FOAMed tool. Instagram is pretty huge and it may well be the number one SoMe platform for the generation that is entering medicine now. So if you are interested in things like teaching young nurses, doctors, paramedics then you might learn something really useful from an unusual source. Instagram is not a fringe #FOAMed platform when Nursing Educators have nearly 200000 followers on Instagram.
First let’s quickly talk about the weird thing that just happened to you if you listened to the podcast first. Yes the podcast is 80% Português. It starts with that annoying Irish guy and then the Português starts at 6:20 when Henrique Herpich takes over. The English starts again at 24:20, cue laughs and we are done. We immediately went out for drinks and there is a reason that the Irish and the Brazilians get on very well. (My brother in law is Brazilian. He is extremely cool. Olá Gustavo!)
But why? Why would I try to alienate the listeners to this podcast by hitting them with a podcast in another language? The Lusophone Commonwealth is why. Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Portugal, Guinea-Bissau, East Timor, Equatorial Guinea, Macau, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe. 207 million Portuguese speakers in Brazil alone. Most Portuguese speakers are in countries where medicine is either developing very fast or in need of developing very fast! So they could do with some Português FOAMed. So we need FOAM other than English; #FOAMOTE
The hope is that everyone involved with #FOAM and #FOAMed will look to their language-other-than-English colleagues and see opportunities and not barriers. These people want to work together and the fact that YOU don’t speak their language does NOT mean that you cannot work together. (That and the fact that @Sandnsurf speaks Portugueś and wanted to hear more Portugueś podcasts.)
 This PodcastThese are the #FOAMedBRA people that were in the room:
Ian, Henrique, Lucas, Jule, Niciole and Daniel.
@breakem www.breakem.org Go there and click on “Quem seguimos” (Who we Follow).
(Nearly Dr) Henrique Herpich Twitter @H_Herpich
Dr Lucas Oliveira J. e Silva @Lucasojesilva12 isaem.net
Dr Jule Santos emergenciarules.com Twitter; @julesantosER Instagram; Emergencia Rules and a podcast! https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/emerg%C3%AAncia-rules/id1387183276
Dr Nicole Pinheiro @nicolepin
Dr Daniel Schubert Twitter @ducschub
So what I want all #FOAMedBRA people to do is spread this around all the nurses, doctors, paramedics in the Portugueś speaking world and get them to visit this post, listen to this podcast because this is a felicitation. This is people like me and people like you saying “HelloMyNameIsXXXX, nice to meet you, how can I help?” to the entire Lusophonic world. There is more that unites us than divides us. 
FOAMbra Links are all on LITFL.com and TheTopEnd.org

Jellybean 108 Emergency Medicine and FOAM in Brazil

Abnormal Treatment Behaviour.

The stress and trauma associated with what you do is real and it affects how you perform. 

Jannie Geertsema is a child and adolescent psychiatrist working at the Hospital Formerly Known as Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital. He was at the last wonderful Don’t Forget The Bubbles Conference in Melbourne.
The “doctor patient relationship”. You may work in a ‘gnarly’ emergency room, or an over run ICU but the sort of damage we are talking about can be severe in almost any care-givers role. Jannie is a care giver that works with children/adolescents and their parents and regularly finds himself in the unfortunate space in between parent and child. Think about that sort of dynamic. It’s a dangerous space as Leonardo can tell you.
Jannie has become increasingly interested in this and started to dive into the stress and trauma associated with his role. Increasingly he has found that many of his colleagues (psychatrists and others) have similar problems.
There is one half of that relationship that we almost certainly have not given the appropriate attention. My half. The providers half, The therapists half. Your half. You!
Jannie throws himself on the psychiatrists couch and blows open a rarely considered trap; The Abnormal Therapeutic relationship. This exists for all clinicians in a “therapeutic” relationships with their patients/clients/consumers.
Call them “variably autonomous, mostly humanoid, largely organic carbon based therapy consuming units” if you want. (Usually referred to as VAMHLOCBTCU’s). I usually still call them patients but I am not a psychiatrist or a midwife or one of the various other disciplines that have their own good reasons not to call them patients.
We talk a lot about the “Doctor-Patient Relationship” in this podcast. But we are not just talking about doctors when we talk about “Abnormal Treatment Behaviour”. There are a few reasons that the “Doctor-Patient” phrase is used; the crucial paper that Jannie refers to is written by an Australian Psychiatrist qualified in the 1960’s; Prof Bruce S Singh. (I mistakenly refer to his paper as being written in the 1960's but it was actually published in 1981.) And both Jannie and I identify as doctors. Jannie expands on this further when you listen to the linked talk from DFTB and is asked a question about it at the end. (There is a link below.)
There is not a lot more written, at least not that Jannie has found. That we have only one paper written by a psychiatrist does not dismiss the other variations on this theme. In fact, each variation, be it Nurse-Patient, Psychologist-Patient, Social Worker-Patient…., would surely merit it’s own analysis. I am willing to bet that there is more written about this by experts from the other caring professions than by the physicians.
If there is one thing to take away from this it is that I do not exist as an inert perfect practitioner. I do not perform in a perfect space. I am flawed. I have feelings. I barely know what my own feelings are. But if I can just keep in mind that I do have thoughts and feelings, that they do affect my interactions with others, then I am at least cogniscent of the fact that roughly half of the people in the “Doctor-Patient Relationship” are Me. Or You. Or Us. I do not need to have read, or agree with, Freud to benefit from that sort of insight.
As Jannie puts it if you can keep in mind that you are anything less than perfect then you are getting somewhere.
If you can get to the next DFTB then you are getting somewhere special.
If you cannot then you can stream the entire conference for a small fee or for FREE if you are in a lower/middle income country. That is fantastic. Has anyone else done that?

LINKS
All the Links are available over on TheTopEnd.org

Jellybean 107 Abnormal Treatment Behaviour

Vaccine hesitancy and vaccine refusal. New York is in crisis. Who is hesitant, who is refusing, what should you do? We asked Dr Margie Danchin. She knows.

New York Measles Crisis. This is not a paediatric issue. This affects us all. Margie Danchin has been thinking about vaccines and the related controversy for many years. She is a paediatrician that has researched and worked clinically in this area at the highest level. She shared her knowledge with the lucky punters that came to DontForgetTheBubbles in Melbourne last year. DFTB 2018. If you can go the next DFTB, in London in June, you really should.

THE BLURB

New York City is in a health emergency. Mayor Di Blasio has taken the radical step of making vaccination mandatory and has threatened fines of $1000 for non-compliance. How did we get to this? What are exemptions, who asks for them, who gets them, who gives them and who makes up the rules?

You might have an opinion about vaccination and anti-vaccination. You may have read a bit about it. You have not read as much or thought as much as this woman. Margie Danchin is a researcher and clinician practicing in this area. She was willing to speak to the room at DFTB2018. She was willing to come and talk to the podcast. Margie gives a fantastic insight into the Australian version of this problem and her insights are really valuable in times like this not just for Australian listeners, for us all. A crisis like this is potentially coming to your town, your city and your hospital soon. I strongly recommend you listen to this and check out the wonderful DFTB page which has a bunch of great links and her talk on stage and a great illustrated note (#doodlemed ) by @gracie_leo and more good stuff. You have to be impressed by what Drs Davis, Lawton, Goldstein and Tagg are doing over there. I am. @TessaRDavis @paedsem @henrygoldstein and @andrewjtagg

Go to the conference in London. If you cannot go you should follow the DFTB Podcast and those little Educational Nuggets will literally find their own way to you. Then go to the next conference in 2020. Have you got something better to do?

Margie is a compassionate doctor that reads the hardcore medical research and sits with the real world vaccine refusers and vaccine hesitant people. She spends hours of each week with real people that care for their children in her specialist clinic in Melbourne. Listen to her wonderfully balanced and open-minded words.

The MumBubVax resource is here.

http://www.ncirs.org.au/ncirs-seminarwebinar-series/20319-2019-influenza-program-and-mumbubvax-new-tool-support-midwife

LINKS are good.

@DanchinMargie

http://www.ncirs.org.au/our-work/sharing-knowledge-about-immunisation

https://www.skaiproject.org/about-the-projecthttps://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/dont-forget-the-bubbles/id1281356948?mt=2

https://dontforgetthebubbles.com/margie_danchin/

The Jellybean Podcast is a funny little thing. We advocate and collaborate. In the coming months there will be a load of new interviews. A very mixed bag of different subjects and different voices from different events and different backgrounds. We kind of need people to subscribe to be able to keep going.

https://thetopend.org/subscribe-to-the-podcast/

JB 82 Wisam Al Basaam

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