Acute Care In-Service (ACIS) Training
What is the Acute Care Inservice Course (ACIS)?
The Acute Care Inservice Course is a tailored solution for in-service team training of nurses, physicians and other practitioners who will be delivering emergency and time-sensitive acute care to patients at the district and provincial hospital levels. The course covers all essential elements of basic emergency care, including responding to emergencies associated with infectious disease, road traffic crashes, and the growing epidemic of non-communicable disease (including emergency care for patients with complications of hypertension, diabetes and cardiac disease).
Why use the Acute Care Inservice Course?
Many extant courses teach participants to rely upon equipment or medications that are not available at the district or provincial hospital level; or train cadres in isolation, resulting in poor performance despite heavy investment in continuing education for health-care practitioners. The Acute Care Inservice Course is unique in that it teaches life-saving immediate response skills that are accessible to practitioners from a variety of cadres, using only the equipment and medication available at the district hospital level, and focuses on the burden of diseases that are the most challenging for the patient population served there. The team training approach and practical skill simulations allow for immediate real-world implementation of the knowledge gained by participants in the course, and integrated pre- and post-testing strategies ensure easy recognition of both extraordinary and struggling practitioners.
Will the Acute Care Inservice Course work for me?
The ACIS has been extensively field tested in settings in both East and West Africa, with very high ratings for utility and value from participants as well as real-time curriculum personalization to ensure adherence to national level clinical practice guidelines and medication lists. The course allows for a pre-packaged, evidence-based and up-to-date solution for upskilling clinicians currently in practice in emergency care settings and allows decision-makers to have confidence in the diagnostic and clinical acumen of the practitioners staffing emergency centers and providing time-sensitive acute care. The ACIS is tailored to the varying educational and clinical needs of mixed-cadre teams working together to save the lives of patients with a diversity of medical and traumatic illnesses, and is ideal for regions or nations experiencing the challenge of addressing the burden of disease from injury or non-communicable illness.
Individuals using the ACIS are assured that it will integrate seamlessly with the other elements within the sidHARTe toolkit for acute care systems (STACS). The training provided in the ACIS course ensures that clinicians know how and when to use the drugs, and medical equipment in the essential emergency package (EEP), and teaching is coherent with either extant clinical practice guidelines or the sidHARTe Emergency Medical Clinical Guidelines. Continuous assessment and supportive supervision of skills gained in the ACIS course are also available as a part of the complete STACS.