Message from the Founding Director
.jpg)
Welcome to the Centre of Excellence for Trauma and Emergencies (CETE) at The Aga Khan University!
More than half of the total burden of diseases in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) are caused by health emergencies. In addition, trauma is one of the leading causes of mortality globally, predominantly affecting young bread earners of low-income families.
Similarly, epidemics, wars, and other disasters also disproportionally impact the world's poor and more vulnerable populations. One statistic exemplifies this: over 90% of storm-related deaths in the last 20 years have occurred in low- and middle-income countries, even though these countries experienced only 32% of all storms.
Our Centre is located right in the middle of the most vulnerable populations and focuses on research, capacity building, and advocacy on saving lives during the acute phase of individual and population-level emergencies and trauma.
In the area of capacity building, CETE serves as the secretariat of a national program that trains youth in basic cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and hemorrhage control skills. With the ultimate target of training 10 million Pakistanis as live savers in 10 years, the "Pakistan Life Savers Programme" (PLSP) aims to mobilize and empower the youth of Pakistan. Another focus of the PLSP is to advocate for educational and healthcare policy reforms to support the life-saving skills of the future generations of Pakistanis. Furthermore, the CETE is actively involved in research capacity building within future healthcare providers through a longstanding international grant. This grant allows the CETE to support Ph.D. and Masters's level training from Pakistan, Kenya, Tanzania, and Central Asia.
The CETE is in the process of strengthening its research portfolio by carrying out in-depth assessments of the current system of managing patients with trauma and emergencies through stakeholder analyses, review of existing literature, and analysis of current data and reports.
We know any impactful and sustainable intervention would require collaboration with partners in and outside the regions we work in. Therefore, we are actively looking for collaborators and partners to join our journey in solving these problems in developing countries. Our focus on building and nurturing partnerships is the cornerstone of our efforts at CETE.
To learn more and explore how you can best contribute to our Centre, please contact
coe.te@aku.edu.
Sincerely,
Junaid Razzak, MBBS PhD
Director, Centre of Excellence for Trauma and Emergencies
Aga Khan University
Vice-Chair Research, Department of Emergency Medicine
Weill Cornell Medicine
