It’s 8:30 a.m. at Thai Binh University, and Wes Zeger, D.O., is teaching a class.
The associate professor in UNMC’s Department of Emergency Medicine wasn’t in Vietnam, however; he was in the department’s conference room, at 7:30 p.m. local time, teleconferencing his lecture to the Thai Binh students.
The presentation, one of a series held weekly throughout December, is the follow-up to the emergency department’s fall trip to Vietnam. Inspired by the late Paul Tran, M.D., his emergency department colleagues are working with Thai Binh University to enhance emergency medical care and medical education in Tran’s homeland.
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The 10-day trip to Vietnam, with five actual teaching days, was a success, said Michael Wadman, M.D., vice chair of emergency medicine, who headed the project.
“We were a little unsure of how well our conference formats would be accepted,” Dr. Wadman said. Other institutions that had mounted similar projects cautioned that it would be hard to engage the Vietnamese medical students in a back-and-forth discussion of cases.
“At first, it seemed they weren’t sure if they should offer their opinions,” Dr. Wadman said. But when the lecturer salted the audience with UNMC colleagues to get the questions started, “the students just started to chime in,” he said.
In fact, the lecture series proved more popular than either Dr. Wadman or Thai Binh officials had foreseen.
When the university’s director of international relations called the UNMC team into her office to discuss “a problem,” Dr. Wadman admitted he was wondering if, through unfamiliarity with the culture, he had said or done something wrong.
The “problem,” in fact, was that so many students wanted to attend the lectures that there weren’t enough seats. “Can we put more chairs in the room?” the director asked Dr. Wadman.
With the first section of the project completed, the online lecture series is the next step in the UNMC-Thai Binh collaboration of which Dr. Tran dreamed – which his friends brought to reality. With Dr. Tran’s daughter, first-year UNMC medical student Catherine Tran, attending in Omaha, Dr. Zeger runs through a recent emergency room case.
The group will return to Thai Binh in January. The goal now is that after the second trip, the online classes will continue, perhaps on a monthly basis.
“We want to stay true to Paul’s overall plan, and that’s for an ongoing relationship,” Dr. Wadman said.
