Rheumatic heart disease is a devastating heart disease which affects 34 million people with most of the burden of disease in Africa any do not receive timely treatments because of failure to make a diagnosis which is most commonly made with a cardiac ultrasound performed by cardiologist in most emerging countries.
Ghana a population of 25 million has about 10 cardiologists which is woefully adequate to address screening and diagnosis of rheumatic heart disease in young patients .
To address the inadequate skill force we seek to embrace a USA model where ultrasound technologist are the backbone of cardiac ultrasound image acquisition and use this model in low resource settings where there are not enough cardiologists to perform cardiac ultrasound diagnosis.
As part of a pilot and using smart tablet ultrasound technology and a remote educational platform we set up a training school in Tamale /Ghana in partnership with the University Hospital of tamale to train cardiac ultrasound technologist as a part of an initial pilot with an educational curriculum similar to the USA to fill the skill gap provided by cardiologist.We currently have 3 students in training and hope to scale to 10 students using on line training curriculum and in person mentoring.The model if successful could be scaled in partnership with the University of Ghana and the Government of Ghana to provide a highly skilled healthcare force for Ghana and West Africa ..
