The Emergency Department at the Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC) will be developed to serve as a centre of emergency medicine training and research in the region, the newly-appointed chairman of the department has said.

Speaking to Gulf Times, Prof Peter Cameron said efforts were being made to upgrade services at the department which receives up to 1,500 patients daily.

“One of the challenges for me as the new chairman is, obviously, to manage but (I will) also (have) to ensure that the HMC becomes the world-leading healthcare facility and part of that is to increase and improve training in all aspects and so I think this will effectively make this corporation the regional centre for training in emergency medicine.”

He said that there were also hopes of increasing efforts towards research in the field of emergency medicine because of its serious service requirements.

“ I hope that in the next 12 months, we can get enough human resources to make all that happen as efforts are being made to recruit more physicians from the GCC region, India, Pakistan, Australia, the UK, the US and Canada.”

There are more than 300 nurses and 200 doctors presently employed at the HMC Emergency Department.

The plan is to increase the number of staff at the emergency by between 25-30% over the next six to 12 months.

Prof Cameron explained that one of the problems for emergency medicine was because it was a new specialty, many countries lacked senior experts in the profession.

“Many countries around the world and not just Qatar don’t have senior specialists in that area, although they have doctors working in emergency medicine but the physicians still don’t have that level of training, so we are hoping to be able to provide that kind of high quality training in the nearest future.”

There are about 30 senior consultants in the emergency medicine at the HMC.

According to him, the actual process of managing emergency services is very similar around the world despite the differences in the types of diseases occurring in various regions of the world.

“Over the next 10 years, we hope to see a state-of-the-art healthcare facility that is purpose-built and designed to suit this environment and we want to see a world-class service with our physicians delivering high quality of care. I’ll also like to see the department being integrated with the rest of the hospitals within the corporation.”

The official said that beside road accidents and other trauma incidence relating to the construction work , most of the cases being received at the department were “see and treat” patients.

“We are receiving a lot of patients with minor problems or injuries and also including those suffering from upper respiratory infections, heat-related illnesses and kidney stone problems due to the acute weather condition.”

He said that as part of the ongoing renovation of the entire HMC facilities, the department was also doing an interim re-development, which is expected to go on for the next three-four years.

“There is also a much bigger development, which will occur within the next eight to 10 years, so there is a lot of redevelopment and renovating improvement guidelines and that represent a number of things among the changes that we are going to be effecting soon,” Prof Cameron explained.

“All these efforts are necessary in the face of the massive investments that the Qatari government is ingesting into the healthcare system of the country as well as the expected increase in population…so, it does mean that it is a fast moving enterprise,” he added.