Your Excellency Dr Phouthone Meuangpak, Vice Minister of Health
Esteemed Cabinet Colleagues,
Ladies and gentlemen,
Good Morning (Sabaidee Ton Sao),
I am delighted to be part of the opening of today’s meeting together with Dr Phouthone. Having Emergency Medical Teams available, and ready to deploy is crucial when we respond to major outbreaks and disasters.
This is because, when a district is hit by a disaster local health facilities often get damaged or destroyed. We saw this in Attapeu in 2018 and, to a lesser extent, in the floods this year. Many people are sick or injured and in need of treatment, but there is little or no health care available. Indeed, staff who would normally provide treatment are among the sick and injured.
If the Ministry of Health can rapidly send a medical team to the disaster hit district, then it can save many lives – and prevent a lot of suffering. This, essentially, is the service that an Emergency Medical Team (or EMT) provides.
Being able to do this requires two things:
- Having doctors, nurses and other essential staff identified in advance – and available to deploy at short notice. These are the members of the EMT
- Having a small team in the Ministry of Health that can: firstly decide when and where to send the EMT; and secondly make all the administrative and organizational arrangements needed. This is the EMT Coordination Centre
You will be discussing how to create both these capacities – the EMT and the EMT Coordination Centre – at this meeting. I talk about the EMT, but in reality there are several different types of EMT the Ministry of Health might want to dispatch. These range from a mobile team giving primary care to a fixed location team doing major surgery.
It could also be the case that, in a major emergency, there could be more several EMTs deployed to a disaster hit district. This makes the job of the EMT Coordination Centre even more important. It can be running a small, temporary health system for several weeks, or even months.
Achieving these capacities will take a lot of planning and organization. For example, it can mean having medical supplies and equipment that can be mobilized at short notice. And of course, it means having rotas of staff with various different skill sets who are available for deployment at short notice. So you have some important work to do.
New Zealand went through a similar process during my time as Director of Public Health there. It was hard work, but in the end it was worth it. We had the ability to pull together teams with highly specific skill sets and dispatch them pretty much anywhere in the world. And we could do this in a matter of hours.
I would like to end by thanking the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) for their financial support. I also thank the Cabinet Office in Ministry of Health for organizing this important meeting.
Ladies and gentlemen, your work over the next 2 days should enable Lao PDR to assemble and dispatch national EMTs. Your collaboration and contribution is key to making this happen. It is key to ensuring people receive rapid and high quality medical treatment after an emergency strikes them. Ultimately, it is key to saving lives.
I wish you a successful meeting
Thank you! Khop Chai!