The pilot assessment of the TEAMS 3 project (Training for Emergency Medical Teams and European Medical Corps), a two-year that was supported by the European Commission’s ECHO Program and carried out with the cooperation of Emergency and Disaster Medicine Research Center (CRIMEDIM) and World Health Organization (WHO) was held in Istanbul hosted by Istanbul Medeniyet University and the Turkish Red Crescent on 02-06 September 2022 in MAFOM facility of Turkish Red Crescent.
The project, of which our University is also a partner, was conducted to develop, implement and evaluate a feasible, standardized, validated and cost-effective education package for low-income countries which can be active in different EMT (Emergency Medical Teams) groups by creating EMTs from available teams. TEAMS 3 project was built on both the TEAMS project started in 2017 and completed in 2019, and the TEAMS 2 project started in 2019 and completed in 2021. The pilot evaluation of the updated new simulation package developed by adding infectious diseases and war-conflict simulations in the TEAMS 3 project was carried out successfully under the coordination of Assoc.Prof.Dr. Kurtuluş AÇIKSARI of our Faculty of Medicine. In the event, where 51 participants consisting of health and disaster specialists took part, the training and feedback process was carried out by Prof.Dr. Behcet AL, who is the head of IMU Emergency Medicine Department, Asst.Prof.Dr. Görkem Alper SOLAKOĞLU of IMU Internal Medicine Department, and Dr. Mehmet KOÇAK.
A simulated environment similar to a real disaster experience was created for the participants and observers at the MAFOM facility of the Turkish Red Crescent for 4 days, and performances of the team members who had not worked with each other before were evaluated. Among the 51 participants were paramedics, nurses, doctors, health technicians, health officers, disaster specialists, logistics specialists and Russian Red Cross disaster specialists. In addition, the Turkish Red Crescent’s Emergency Response Unit (ERU) project team took an active role in the facility to support all the needs of the guests, enabling this challenging organization to be realized successfully.
