More than 40 physicians and other healthcare professionals met at Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar (WCM-Q) for five days of seminars, workshops and panel discussions about the management of bleeding in patients undergoing surgical procedures.
The Perioperative Bleeding Management – Patient Blood Management symposium, a collaboration between WCM-Q, Hamad Medical Corp (HMC) and Danube University Krems, Austria, addressed topics such as blood management in trauma and critical care patients, as well as in patients undergoing cardiac, liver or orthopaedic surgery.
The symposium also discussed bleeding management in paediatric surgery, the effects of drug treatments and inherited disorders on bleeding and coagulation, iron therapy, thrombosis and the role of red blood cells, plasma and platelets in blood transfusions.
The event, which was co-ordinated by WCM-Q’s Division of Continuing Professional Development, was attended by some of the world’s leading physicians and healthcare professionals in their fields, which included anaesthesiology, intensive care, internal medicine, surgery, transfusion medicine and blood banking, according to a press statement.
Effective blood management is a crucial element of perioperative care, which covers the three phases of surgery: preoperative, intraoperative and postoperative.
As such, medical practitioners are working to develop new and enhanced blood management processes to maximise healthcare outcomes.
Dr Marcus Lancé, senior consultant in the Department of Anesthesiology, ICU & Perioperative Management, HMC, said: “In Europe and the US, the medical profession is moving towards a more standardised approach to perioperative bleeding management with established best practices based on very good data.
“The benefit of this symposium is that we are able to impart that knowledge here in Qatar to help with the continuous process of enhancing healthcare outcomes.”
Other speakers at the event included one of Europe’s foremost anaesthesiologists, Dr Donat Spahn, professor and chairman at the Institute of Anaesthesiology, University Hospital of Zurich, Switzerland.
Other leading medical institutions represented by speakers at the event were HMC; Glenfield Hospital, University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, UK; Maastricht University Medical Centre, Netherlands; Santa Maria University Hospital, Udine, Italy; and the Fundeni Clinical Institute, Bucharest, Romania.
The event was accredited locally by the Qatar Council for Healthcare Practitioners-Accreditation Department and internationally by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education.
Instrumental in the co-ordination of the collaborative event were the WCM-Q Division of Continuing Professional Development, Dr Lancé, Dr Robert Crone, vice-dean for Clinical & Faculty Affairs, professor of Clinical Paediatrics and professor of Clinical Anaesthesiology at WCM-Q; and Prof Marco Marcus, chairman of the Department of Anaesthesiology, ICU and Perioperative Medicine at HMC and adjunct professor of Clinical Anaesthesiology at WCM-Q.
Dr Crone said, “This was an extremely important and highly effective event that brought some of the finest medical professionals in their respective fields to Doha to share their expertise with a cadre of interested physicians from the region and around the world.”