Let me continue from Part I with an extension of a familiar aquatic theme. (After all, half of our Medical Training Advisory Group (MTAG) team is US Navy.) “If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime.” We are here to take that proverb to the next level. Our development with the Afghans of the Afghan National Army’s Armed Forces Academy of Medical Sciences (AFAMS) is the first step in teaching the Afghans how to teach other Afghans how to fish. Some of the schools and courses within AFAMS are the Combat Medic (and Trauma Assistance Personnel for the Afghan National Police), Medical Logistics, and Patient Administration courses, as well as Nursing and Medical schools. But the enduring piece, teaching the Afghans how to teach other Afghans how to fish, is found in our recent faculty development courses and the start of real graduate medical education programs. In the very near future, we will expand this effort with faculty, residency, and nursing education development partnerships involving the University of Nebraska Medical School and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) as well as the Nebraska Army National Guard. The graduates of these programs will be the foundation of future Afghan medical education, the teachers of fishermen.
Switching gears (or nets, as it were), there are three other foundational efforts we are helping the Afghans put into place. A patient-centered electronic encounter form will greatly increase the quality of the patient care data that is maintained in patient records. In addition, this data will feed a central database which will give actionable information senior leaders from clinic/hospital commanders to the Surgeons General which they can use to apportion their scarce resources more effectively. Second, credentialing will give the Afghans a way to assess and track the clinical competency of their physicians for the first time. Third, we are developing much more robust hospital standards for the ANA and ANP which we expect to be adapted by the Ministry of Public Health, thereby becoming the national hospital standard of care for all of Afghanistan.
Several months ago, we recognized the need to do a better job of teaching ourselves to be the teachers of the teachers of those fishermen. A huge team of contributors put together a 150-page tome called the Medical Mentor Manual. Its intent was to be almost everything you would want to know about medical advising in Afghanistan, but just did not realize you needed to ask. In addition, we are working with Joint Staff and First Army to pare down pre-deployment medical mentor training to make it shorter and more appropriate in content to better prepare future medical advisors for their mission here. At the end of this effort, we envision that Afghan will say to Afghan, “Take my hand. Follow me.”
