BYU nursing professors and students train doctors in the Himalayas in the art of mountain medicine.
Each year more than two million Hindu pilgrims embark on the Char Dham Yatra, a spiritual pilgrimage that winds its way through the Garhwal Himalayas. But from high altitudes and freezing temperatures to unpredictable natural disasters, “there’s a huge potential for disaster” in the mountain range, says BYU nursing professor Craig Nuttall (MS ’11). “This summer there was a huge flood and mudslide that killed thousands of people,” leaving thousands more trapped. The nearest major medical center, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), is hours away from the pilgrimage path, making rescue and treatment difficult.
Enter the Mountain People Project, an organization founded by Nuttall and his colleague Scott K. Summers (MS ’11) after Nuttall went to India in 2021 to teach wilderness medicine at the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering (NIM). The two professors started taking students to train mountain guides in wilderness medicine at NIM. Then they discovered the need to train the doctors overseeing the Char Dham Yatra. “We went and worked in a little remote clinic up there,” Nuttall says. “We saw 500 patients a day.”
Knowing that they had to do more to help, Nuttall got in contact with the Indian government, and AIIMS Rishikesh received funding for an emergency helicopter team to service the Char Dham Yatra.
Kiley Dildine Bearden (BS ’18), a master’s student in the family nurse practitioner program, worked with Nuttall to create a training program for helicopter flight nurses. “They’ve been able to save so many people already,” Bearden says. “It was really cool to be a very small part of that.” Because this was the first emergency medical flight team in the area, Bearden created the training from scratch. “As a student you’re basically always the one…being trained,” Bearden says, “so it was cool for me to be on the other side of things.”
The Mountain People Project continues to expand its outreach, with plans to train high-altitude rescuers in the country of Georgia while maintaining its partnerships in India. “We want to help anyone that lives in the mountains,” says Nuttall.
