Spotlight on Seed Grant Recipient Dr. Samy Bendjemil
By Mohammed Al Kadhim
September 13, 2024
Burkina Faso, a West African nation of more than 20 million people, lacks formal trauma care training or a hospital-based trauma education program for healthcare professionals. Since 2021, Dr. Samy Bendjemil, MD, MPH, a Surgical Critical Care Fellow in the Section Acute Care Section of General Surgery, has worked to address this gap by implementing pre-hospital hemorrhage control education for laypeople through a non-profit he founded called Pull for Progress. His team has made strides in improving emergency response using a picture-based Stop the Bleed curriculum developed in partnership with local institutions and supported by the U.S. Embassy.
A new collaboration – funded by a Global Surgery Seed Grant – between the Stanford Department of Surgery, Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health, Pull for Progress, the Primary Trauma Care Foundation, Joseph Ki-Zerbo University, and Koudougou Regional Hospital aims to fill that void by advancing trauma education in Burkina Faso, ultimately saving the lives of trauma victims.
Dr. Bendjemil shared his insights into the project and recounted details from his recent trip to Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, in August:
I have always been passionate about global health and humanitarian work, which motivated my decision to pursue a career in medicine. During medical school, I earned my Master of Public Health alongside my Medical Degree, initially planning to specialize in primary care and infectious disease. However, after discovering my strong interest during my surgery rotation, I decided to change my path and focus on surgery.
After my third year of medical school, I was awarded a Fulbright scholarship, giving me the opportunity to live in Burkina Faso for a year. My project focused on implementing a hygiene and sanitation program in rural villages to prevent transmissible diseases through a community health club model. The program was highly successful, earning endorsements from both the U.S. Embassy and the Burkina Faso Ministry of Health, which now use it as a model for similar initiatives. During this time, I co-founded the non-profit Pull for Progress with my colleague, Dr. Moumini Niaone. Since 2016, we’ve launched several self-sustaining projects, including community health clubs, girls’ education programs, and free clinics, through which we have treated more than 30,000 patients in just five years.
While road injuries, particularly motorcycle crashes, have long been common in Burkina Faso, gunshot wounds were almost unheard of until 2016. That year, political shifts left the country vulnerable to rising terrorist extremism in the Sahel region. Since then, Burkina Faso has faced a rapidly escalating humanitarian crisis, with thousands of civilians killed and more than two million people internally displaced. As the crisis worsened, we recognized an urgent need for trauma education.
During my surgery residency, I decided to implement the Stop the Bleed program in Burkina Faso. Stop the Bleed is a public health initiative led by the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma, designed to train laypeople as first responders to life-threatening bleeding. It has been well received in the United States. In December 2021 we launched pilot programs in Burkina Faso, which were also very well-received. Eventually, we secured grant funding from the U.S. Embassy and the Peace Corps alumni organization Friends of Burkina Faso. This support enabled us to expand our efforts and develop a picture-based curriculum to better meet the needs of the local population. We adapted the program into a picture-based curriculum to overcome language barriers created by regional dialects, while also considering cultural differences in learning styles. Using visuals was a significant help, especially when working in remote areas where people speak various dialects and lack access to electricity and infrastructure for something like a PowerPoint presentation.
While Stop the Bleed is effective for prehospital hemorrhage control, it does not address hospital care. In the United States, emergency providers are trained with Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS), a standardized curriculum developed by the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma. However, this training is unavailable in many countries, including Burkina Faso. After reviewing feasible curriculums, we partnered with the Primary Trauma Care Foundation and applied for a seed grant from Stanford’s Department of Surgery and Center for Innovation in Global Health. This grant will fund a pilot project to implement hospital-based trauma education.
In early August, we traveled to Ghana and Burkina Faso to launch the first phase of the trauma education project. In Ghana, we partnered with the Medical Simulation Skills Institute, where three surgeons from Burkina Faso—Dr. Kabore, Dr. Nacanabo, and Dr. Sanou—completed a five-day course to become certified Primary Trauma Care (PTC) instructors. They are now the first core group of trauma educators in Burkina Faso. Afterward in Burkina Faso, we met with leaders from Koudougou Regional Hospital, the Ministry of Health, and Joseph Ki-Zerbo University to lay the groundwork for the program’s implementation.
While in Ouagadougou, we held a nationally televised forum to discuss the Stop the Bleed program and the urgent need for additional trauma education programs. The forum was attended by the U.S. Ambassador, the Director General of the Ministry of Health, the Vice President of the University of Ouagadougou, the Director of Emergency Response in Burkina Faso, and the Director of the University of Ouagadougou Department of Public Health. These stakeholders all expressed strong support for continued trauma education programs, and we used the opportunity to introduce the new trauma education project in collaboration with Stanford’s Department of Surgery and the Center for Innovation in Global Health. The support from local and international stakeholders has been crucial.
Our goal is to integrate the PTC curriculum into Burkina Faso's medical school curriculum. The seed grant will allow us to pilot the program and evaluate its effectiveness. In the coming months, PTC instructors will train healthcare workers at Koudougou Regional Hospital, with plans to expand to district hospitals.
My mentor and Co-PI, Dr. Joe Forrester, will join me in January to continue supporting the project and meeting with local stakeholders. As the PTC program becomes more established, we will integrate ultrasound training into the curriculum. Using portable probes that connect to phones and tablets, participants will learn essential ultrasound skills to quickly identify traumatic injuries, which will enhance trauma care in the region.
This collaborative effort represents more than just a response to an immediate crisis – it is laying the foundation for sustainable trauma education in the country. The program, backed by key local and international stakeholders, aims to create lasting change by integrating trauma care training into medical curriculums and healthcare systems. The hope is that this initiative will not only save lives in Burkina Faso, but also inspire similar trauma education programs in other underserved regions around the world, ultimately transforming global trauma care in all resource-limited settings.