Vamos a Cuenca!

 Team Awesome ready to start the action, Regional Hospital Vicente Moscoso

 At Turi, the ultimate Cuenca lookout, with our incredible LATE host Sandro

With Emmy and Caro, two of our four Ecuadorian colleagues for the project, both LATE members

Let the journey begin! After all the work we've put in before, we're excited to let the project begin in Cuenca. Elissa arrived on Sunday afternoon to an incredible welcome, and after a night in the Quito airport and getting rerouted to Guayaquil due to weather, Jeremy and I finally got into one of the most beautiful cities I've ever seen. Many old churches, misty mountains, multiple tortuous rivers running through it....Cuenca is such a hidden gem. The real gem, however, has definitely been the people. Sandro, a medical student and member of the LATE trauma league, has been the best host we could have asked for. Emmy, Caro, Fernando, and Pepe, the four trauma league students assigned to assist us in the research, have also been amazing in helping us get to know the city and prepare for the project. We couldn't be more excited.

The past two days we have been getting to know the city and the trauma system with which we will be working. Previous research by our fellow ITSDP colleagues and other LATE students had pointed to communication as a key barrier to the Cuencan trauma system functioning at full capacity. In our meetings with Dr. Juan Carlos Salamea, Dr. Alberto Martinez, and the LATE students, we have organized our upcoming schedule. We currently plan to work on a before and after comparison project with a training program in between focused on the holes we find. The objective data we collect will come from a "yes" or "no" checklist we have created to see if the MIVT presentation ambulance personnel should be communicating at multiple points in the chain. This data will then be used to focus the training for the EMS workers on where they are lacking in the presentation. The follow up study will see how the training improved their performance. We hope to begin the first aspect of the project tomorrow with the help of the students and are beginning the preparations for the training. What an exciting time to be in Cuenca!