Written by guest instructor Philip Camillocci, also published in TechNation.

In December, 2014, I donated 3 weeks of vacation time to go to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to teach Biomedical Electronics to students from hospitals around the country. This program was created and started by Engineering World Health (EWH) and they partner with the University of Puthisastra – Faculty of Health Science.

During the summer I stayed in contact with the EWH team and provided what support I could from the U.S. In October, 2015, Steve Goeby, the program manager, reached out to me and invited me to return to teach again.

I was able to schedule 3 weeks of vacation time with my manager, who supported me in this project. I researched and put together the course material. Once I was satisfied that I had everything together and spell checked, I uploaded copies to Dropbox so that the local EWH staff could have the material translated into Khmer and printed up into study guides for the students by the time I arrived.

I scheduled my trip for December 5 - 28. I flew out of West Palm Beach to Atlanta and then took a connecting flight 15 hours non-stop to Seoul, Korea, and then made a final connection for another 5 hours to Phnom Penh. I left the U.S. at 7am on Dec. 5 and arrived in Cambodia at 10:30pm Sunday, Dec. 6!

The local EWH staff let me sleep in on Monday, but on Tuesday we got to work. We started the students with infant incubators and radiant warmers, as they are both closely related with infant care. Over the next two days, I presented material with the help of a translator, and students were able to work with three older infant incubators and two overhead radiant warmers.

After allowing them to operate and check out the equipment, I set up a lab exercise with the three incubators. I introduced a fault in each unit and verified the symptoms and operation, and then had pairs of students rotate through each station, documenting the systems, their troubleshooting steps, and what the fault was.

Phil working with Von Phearom adding "bugs" to equipment for student troubleshooting exercises

Week two started with a review of Phototherapy equipment. Students had access to two overhead bili-lights and fiber optic units to work with. Once we finished with the lab exercise, we moved on to uninterruptible power supplies. The students found this course particularly helpful, as the electrical grid in the rural areas of the country – where most of them work – is very unreliable and subject to brownouts and blackouts during the hot season. The Cambodian government is working to improve the electrical system in the country and has recently opened a new hydro-electric dam, one of many projects the country is investing in.

During my third week, I assisted the EWH trainers’ review of infusion pumps and syringe pumps. After the material review, the students got to work with a couple of different types of syringe and infusion pumps. For the lab exercise I created faults with the pumps and had the students rotate through stations writing up the systems, troubling shooting steps, and the fault.

During this week, one of the students had a service request from his hospital. They received a donated mobile C-arm unit from Australia. The unit needed new batteries when it arrived and it took the hospital some months to locate and get batteries for the unit. Once the batteries were installed, no one knew how to check the unit out. The original equipment manufacturer stopped supporting this model C-arm in 2007, and there is no biomedical or service support structure in Cambodia yet.

The hospital asked us to check the C-arm out and then give them a class on its use. I went out to the hospital with 2 members of the EWH staff and the student. We examined the C-arm and tested its operation and found everything working correctly. We scheduled a day to return and train the hospital staff on how to use it, and took the class to the hospital as an opportunity to do training. The training went great and now the hospital staff has a new tool to help improve patient care that they were not able to use before!

Class observes X-Ray C-arm function

That is the main focus of the EWH project: to train biomed technicians from the ground up so that they are able to return to their hospital and keep the equipment serviced and running to improve patient care in a developing country. On average, 70% of the equipment is out of service and gathering dust because no one is trained to service it or show the hospital staff how to use it.

Supporting a very worthwhile project such as Engineering World Health’s Biomedical Training program is very satisfying and worth the effort to help improve patient outcomes.

BIO:

Philip Camillocci is a graduate of the U.S. Army Medical Equipment and Optical School. Has been in the Biomedical field for 30 years and is an Instructional Developer for GE Healthcare.