HIGH FLOW OXYGEN THERAPY IN KHAMIR

STAFF STORY FROM YEMEN

NAME: Alison Moebus

HOME: VIC, Australia

ROLE: Paediatric and neonatal nurse

In 2020, Alison joined the team in Al-Salam hospital in Khamir, northern Yemen, to train fellow nurses, assess their competency, and help implement humidified high flow oxygen.

“Respiratory illnesses are one of the major causes of death and illness in children less than five years old worldwide and Khamir is no exception. Babies would present to the hospital in severe respiratory distress caused by bronchiolitis, pneumonia, whooping cough or as a result of prematurity.

Humidified high flow nasal cannula oxygen therapy, or ‘high flow’, provides slightly more respiratory support than the traditional low flow oxygen therapy you receive through a mask or nasal cannulas. Although high flow is commonly used in the care of sick children in many neonatal and paediatric departments around the world, it is less utilised in low-resource settings, and had not been used before by Médecins Sans Frontières in Yemen.

There was a lot of excitement among the nurses and nursing assistants about the implementation of high flow and the implications for our patients. The nurses in Khamir are very skilled but the option of respiratory therapy beyond standard oxygen therapy had never been available before. The nurses attended training workshops where we covered topics such as respiratory anatomy and physiology, respiratory assessment and how high flow worked.

After the nurses and nursing assistants had been trained (the doctors were trained by a paediatrician) we started high flow with our first patient: a two-week-old baby girl with pneumonia. Over the next 10 days she slowly improved, not only with the high flow oxygen therapy and antibiotics, but with the care from the nursing and medical staff in partnership with her family.”