Americans in Kaunas: UofL Emergency Medicine in Lithuania
“
It
Aaron R. Kuzel, DO
is my dream to see emergency medicine in America,” said Dr. Gintare Firantaite, then a second-year emergency medicine resident at the Kauno Klinikos Emergency Medicine Program, over sips of a few beers.“ How can I make this happen?”
As with many good, and sometimes bad ideas, they start somewhere in a bar, this time in a bar outside the city center of Kaunas, Lithuania( after some halfhearted attempts by the bartender to make the“ American Old Fashioned” with anything but Kentucky bourbon). As a third-year resident, I happened to find myself on a tactical medicine elective rotation and, with many thanks to Dr. Daniel O’ Brien, found myself invited to help host a tactical medicine workshop for the Lithuania Society of Emergency Medicine conference in 2022. Tactical medicine, if you are unfamiliar with the term, deals with the health and safety of law enforcement, SWAT personnel and military personnel deployed for critical incidents and also in training for them. This includes the emergency care of special ops units and dedicated teams from various government agencies in situations unsuited to
by Aaron R. Kuzel, DO & Grant Gellert, MD
usual civilian EMS teams.
As the European continent was a few months into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the thought on everyone’ s mind was, what would Putin do next? Particularly for the Baltic States, on the border of Belarus, would they be ready to care for combat wounds in their civilian trauma centers? Could they prepare their emergency medical services to be ready, in the event of a Russian invasion into a fullfledged NATO country? Thankfully, our training wasn’ t required by our NATO allies, but it did open another lane for opportunity. Could we create a program or partnership to bring the global house of emergency medicine together? Could we here in Louisville, live by our UofL mission to make a global impact?
We in the U. S. have become accustomed to the convenience and regularity of emergency departments to care for any patient, anytime, anywhere as all hospitals across the U. S. have emergency departments. On the contrary, in many nations the practice of emergency medicine may be found in its infancy – or completely nonexistent. The Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Louisville( the
( continued on page 22) October 2025 21