Obstetric Anesthesia

Program overview

Obstetric Anesthesia is anesthetic subspecialty dedicated to provide comprehensive anesthetic management of women during pregnancy and the puerperium.

Obstetric Anesthesia Fellowship Program is designed to provide transformation of anesthesia residents to specialized independent practitioners, developing required knowledge, skills and attitude necessary to provide obstetric anesthesia safely, effectively and to the highest standard.

This program takes advantage of the wide variety of clinical, educational, and research resources available in the Department of Anesthesia at Women Wellness and Research Center (WWRC) in order to provide in-depth education in clinical care, research, and leadership in obstetric anesthesia.

Goals and Objectives

Broadly the goals and objective of obstetric anesthesia fellowship focus on patient care, medical knowledge, system-based practice, practice-based learning and improvement, Professionalism, interpersonal and communication skills. Following are the goals and objectives,

• Fellows will be able to provide anesthetic care that is compassionate and appropriate, while demonstrating effective communication within the multidisciplinary care team
• They will be able to confidently perform regional anesthesia techniques as well as general anesthesia in obstetric patients and manage associated complications
• They will be able to competently perform advanced airway management and invasive anesthetic procedures as well as management of complications
• They will display professional behavior with the team members, patients and their families.
• They will be able to gather essential and accurate information about their patients and to formulate an anesthetic care plan within the broader multidisciplinary approach.
• Formulate and tailor anesthetic plans that include consideration of medical, obstetric, and anesthetic risk factors, as well as patient preference and available resources, for patients requiring complex care
• Recognize and initiate treatment of common complications and adverse events attributed to neuraxial anesthesia
• Design and implement institutional policies and protocols for the management of obstetric crises and the management of complications
• Fellows must demonstrate an awareness of and responsiveness to the larger context and system of health care and the ability to effectively call on system resources to provide effective safe care.
• Fellow must be able to investigate and evaluate their patient care practices, appraise and assimilate scientific evidence, and use this information to improve their patient care practices.
• Fellows must demonstrate a commitment to carrying out professional responsibilities, adherence to ethical principles, and sensitivity to a diverse patient population.

Clinical training and Key rotations

The duration of the training program is 24 months in length. Our Primary teaching site is Labor and Delivery Unit at WWRC. WWRC is a tertiary referral center, which provides highly specialized care to women and infants. The hospital has a well-structured clinical pathway and provides care to large number and variety of clinical cases to comfortably meet the fellowship program educational and clinical requirements. Both high and low risk obstetric patients are in sufficient volume and variety to provide a broad educational experience for each fellow without adversely affecting the experience of residents in the anesthesia program.

Other participating sites for obstetric anesthesia fellowship program are Neonatal Unit (WWRC), Maternal-Fetal Medicine Unit (WWRC), Surgical Intensive Care Unit (HGH)/ACC) and Labor and Delivery Unit, Al Wakra Hospital.

The program consists of 13 blocks per academic year, one of which is a vacation block; each block lasts 28 days.

Contact Information

Program Director:
Dr. Anwar ul Huda

Associate program Director:
Dr. Gisha Varghese Mathew

Program Coordinator:
Ebtehag Musa Abdelhamid Mohamed

Program email:
emohamed18@hamad.qa​

Teaching activities

We run very well organised teaching activities which occur on weekly basis. Our regular teaching activity comprise of interactive session focused on topics from our curriculum. In addition, we regular journal clubs, mortality and morbidity meetings, departmental educational activity and MDT meetings. We also have sessions on Obstetric anesthesia Simulation twice per year.

We also conduct research module for our obstetric anesthesia fellows. This module covers the topics including key concepts of clinical trial, formulating research question, study population, randomization, blinding, introduction to statistics, hypothesis testing, understanding regression and how to critically appraise articles.