Bio
I am a Pediatric Critical Care physician with specific expertise in resuscitation science. My research addresses the barriers to quality care for critically ill children in resource-limited environments. Using epidemiological as well as quantitative and qualitative studies, we promote implementation of essential care best practices to providers in rural African healthcare settings. This work has been done in collaboration with colleagues at Catholic University of Health and Allied Sciences in Tanzania, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine as well as Kenya Medical Research Institute – Wellcome Trust Research Program. Globally, I have developed, implemented, and led education programs at 11 sites in 8 countries. Funded by the Laerdal Foundation for Acute Medicine, I conducted the largest CPR training study to date in LMICs and demonstrated teaching paradigms were equally effective to conventional (face-to-face) education. I have led the development of Operation Smile’s Peri-operative pediatrician training program, their modified pre-surgical Pediatric Advanced Life Support training to test resuscitation readiness the mission surgical team. I was funded by the American Heart Association to develop Helping Children Survive, a novel, high-intensity training, and supervision program in collaboration with the Ministry of Health and University of Botswana for community and district hospital-based providers to improve quality of pediatric acute care in clinics, primary and district hospitals. After a successful pilot, we then scaled to the district level. In addition, we piloted a remote assessment of providers’ skills as well as adapted this contextualization approach for referral level providers. These initial studies represent some of the only research of training provider in low- and middle-income countries in pediatric acute care knowledge and skills.
My research demonstrated that although traditional training was valued, needed and impactful, large-scale implementation in LMICs is hampered by the lack of implementation strategies that can adapt to the diverse health systems that exist in LMICs. These limitations have led me to focus on the use of adaptive eLearning as to improve provider proficiency. I moved to Stanford in 2018 to capitalize on the education and technology community and anticipate this work to be the foundation of a novel approach for training healthcare providers worldwide. My research focus in Tanzania has been the developing and refining our intervention, Pediatric Acute Care Education (PACE), an innovative adaptive e-learning environment to increase provider proficiency in newborn and pediatric acute care in LMICs. Funded by the Center for Innovation in Global Health, Laerdal Foundation as well as the Maternal Child Health Research Institute at Stanford, we are utilizing a mixed methods approach to optimize PACE implementation.
