BME project aids medical technicians in Rwanda

A team of Duke students and faculty are aiming to improve the quality of medical equipment in the developing world. Duke biomedical engineering students and faculty have been working on a curriculum that will teach local technicians in developing countries how to maintain and repair medical instruments. Funded by the General Electric Foundation, the program is expected to be implemented in hospitals in Rwanda by March. Approximately 90 percent of medical equipment donated to the developing world does not work when it arrives, said Michelle Garst, a program coordinator in the biomedical engineering department. “The majority of what we are teaching are very simple skills—cleaning a lens on a microscope, for example,” said senior Marian Dickinson, who began working on the project in August. “But even these simple skills require a bit of knowledge in the area, and many of the employees in the developing world haven’t had the training to be able to recognize the problem, or fix it.” The curriculum will include a set of 107 different skills, each of which can be used to fix a particular piece of equipment. Robert Malkin, a professor of biomedical engineering who is helping to lead the project, said the finished program will take two years for each trainee to complete, but technicians can begin to make tremendous contributions within several months. Since reports on donated equipment malfunctions began to emerge ten years ago, Duke biomedical engineering students and professors have been compiling data on repairs done to various pieces of equipment in the developing world. After gathering more than 3,000 repair reports from approximately 50 hospitals in 15 developing countries, the students began categorizing and analyzing data, breaking it down into individual modules. But detailing simple skills sets is challenging. English is the second language in Rwanda, making it difficult to ensure that the modules will be fully understood, said Garst, who has been helping students write out each part of the curriculum. “Subtle things you don’t think about like choosing words that are easy to look up in a dictionary, and that come up as the first, not the fifth definition, make writing the modules difficult,” Garst said. Maggie Finch, a senior who is working on the project this semester, said another issue is finding tools that will be available and inexpensive in poorer regions. The research team hopes to receive funding to implement the curriculum in other developing countries, such as Uganda, Mozambique and South Africa. “If your printer breaks or your computer doesn’t work you call a technician and he fixes it,” Malkin said. “But in the developing world, when the hospital equipment breaks, there’s no one to call. This project fills an absolute need and it fills it quickly.”