To address these training needs, MEBO International will partner with companies, multilateral agencies, and NGOs from across the Caribbean, Central America, and South America to deliver burn treatment and disaster preparedness trainings for 160 health workers from the region. This commitment will build on MEBO's successful 2015 CGI Commitment, which developed a training program for Chinese medical professionals to learn a revolutionary regenerative treatment for burns, Moist Exposed Burn Therapy (MEBT). Capable of skin regeneration, pain relief, anti-infection, and scarless healing, MEBT has been proven to dramatically reduce morbidity and mortality of patients with burns.
Through this new commitment, MEBO’s partner Group Difare and Julphar will utilize their network and relationships in local hospitals to recruit surgeon doctors from Puerto Rico, Panama, Ecuador, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Cuba, and Dominican Republic, who will receive training in MEBT at the Panama Humanitarian Relief Hub training center. These doctors will also receive complementary training in disaster preparedness and emergency rescue training. This training will be provided by personnel at the humanitarian hub.
MEBO's partners will provide the logistics support necessary to implement this training. The Colon Free Trade Zone and Farmazona will coordinate the logistics for medical supplies and training materials to reach the hub, import and ship the supplies to the Humanitarian Hub, used specifically for training purposes. The International Society of Regenerative Medicine and Wound Repair will provide Spanish speaking training materials and a trainer from Ecuador in partnership with Grupo Difare. UAE based company Julphar will coordinate with the Dubai Humanitarian Relief Hub to prepare supplies for the Panama training site.
Four training sessions will be held per year and 40 doctors will participate in each session.
Training supplies will be sent to the Hub by the end of October 2019. The session schedule will be as follows:
Session One: November 15, 2019
Session Two: March 15, 2020
Session Three: June 15, 2020
Session Four: September 15, 2020
November 15, 2020: Complete closing report for the commitment.
The World Health Organization considers burns to be a serious global health problem; every year, fires account for more than 265,000 deaths, with deaths from scalding, electrical burns, and other incidents accounting for further fatalities. Burns disproportionately impact low-and-middle-income countries (LMIC), with 96% of burn-related fatalities taking place in these countries. This is due to the fact that advances in the prevention and treatment of burns have been largely concentrated in high-income countries - studies have shown that doctors in LMICs (which are the majority of countries in the Latin America and Caribbean region) often maintain little training related to burn care.
At the same time, natural disasters and other large-scale emergencies present another large threat to LMICs. In Latin America and the Caribbean, recent natural disasters have exposed significant gaps in disaster preparedness and underscored an acute need for more training opportunities for health workers across the region.