Feasibility of Training Clinical Officers in Point-of-Care Ultrasound for Pediatric Respiratory Diseases in Aweil, South Sudan.

ABSTRACT: Lower respiratory tract infections (LRTIs) are the leading cause of deaths in children < 5 years old worldwide, particularly affecting low-resource settings such as Aweil, South Sudan. In these settings, diagnosis can be difficult because of either lack of access to radiography or clinical algorithms that overtreat children with antibiotics who only have viral LRTIs. Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) has been applied to LRTIs, but not by nonphysician clinicians, and with limited data from low-resource settings. Our goal was to examine the feasibility of training the mid-level provider cadre clinical officers (COs) in a Médecins Sans Frontières project in South Sudan to perform a POCUS algorithm to differentiate among causes of LRTI. Six COs underwent POCUS training, and each subsequently pe

SUBMITTER: Nadimpalli A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6726960 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature