GEMA Grand Rounds: Community-Based CPR Education in Ghana
Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest remains a major challenge in Ghana and other low- and middle-income countries, where limited access to bystander CPR can delay lifesaving intervention before formal emergency care becomes available. "Gye Obi Nkwa!" (translates to "Save a Life") is a Twi-language Hands-Only CPR education initiative developed to address this gap through community-based education designed around the language, context, and realities of the population it serves. Developed under the mentorship of Dr. Naz Karim and the Brown University Global Emergency Medicine Division, the initiative seeks to make lifesaving knowledge accessible, relatable, and actionable. This presentation will share early lessons from the first 186 participants and explore what the experience has revealed about community engagement, health behavior change, culturally and linguistically tailored emergency education, and strengthening community response within emergency care systems in resource-limited settings.
Objectives
By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
- Describe practical lessons from the development and implementation of a community-based CPR education intervention in Ghana.
- Identify principles for designing community-based emergency education interventions in resource-limited settings.
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Vinay N. Kampalath, MD, DTM&H
Assistant Professor, Pediatrics
University of Pennsylvania
Vinay N. Kampalath, MD, DTM&H, is a global health and humanitarian policy specialist focused on emergency care and child health in crisis-affected settings. With over 15 years of experience across research, humanitarian action, public health, and clinical care in more than a dozen countries, Dr. Kampalath's research seeks to develop evidence-based health care delivery for populations in resource-denied settings, promote the development of emergency care systems globally through policy and praxis, and generate the evidentiary and normative basis to protect children living in these contexts. He has collaborated with the World Health Organization on the development of the H3 Package, a normative package of high-priority health services for humanitarian settings, and co-authored the CHH-Lancet Commission on Health, Conflict, and Forced Displacement. His work has appeared in the Lancet, BMJ Global Health, and PLOS Global Public Health. He is on the Editorial Boards of Conflict & Health, PLOS Global Public Health, and the Global Emergency Medicine Literature Review. Dr. Kampalath is the President of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) Global Emergency Medicine Academy (GEMA) and holds academic appointments at the University of Geneva and the University of Pennsylvania. He practices pediatric emergency medicine at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where he did his residency and fellowship. He earned his medical degree from Brown University and trained in tropical medicine and public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.