A new $10 million federal grant will allow the Duke Global Health Institute to expand its partnership with the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre in Tanzania in an effort to strengthen its medical education.
In the past, Duke faculty members in Tanzania have primarily focused on medical research. The University now plans to send Duke faculty to run a five-year medical program that would relay knowledge about research conduct and patient care to aspiring doctors in Tanzania. Some of the ways the program will work to reach its goals are by expanding access to online resources and by improving laboratory facilities for the medical students.
“Our purpose is to strengthen sub-Saharan schools by providing medical infrastructure and technology which enables the perpetual education of outstanding citizens,” said Dr. John Bartlett, associate director of Duke’s Global Health Institute and co-principal investigator of the collaboration. “We aim to empower those people.”
KCMC is one of four referral hospitals in the area and is also a medical school. Tanzania is one of the target countries for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS relief and the President’s Malaria Initiative, said Dr. Moshi Ntabye, executive director of KCMC and co-principal investigator on the grant.
Duke’s partnership with KCMC began in 1995 but until now had not included collaboration on medical education. Currently about 20 members of Duke’s health education staff are involved in the medical education collaboration, along with 50 people from KCMC and 120 Tanzanian medical students per year for the five-year medical school program.
“This comes to a total of 600 medical students that benefit from our efforts,” Bartlett said.
He said it is necessary to evaluate the program’s effects on medical education to make sure it is worth continuing.
The program will measure its own success and evaluate problem areas by observing acquisition of knowledge, professor satisfaction, retention of physicians in Tanzania, the number of new faculty that join KCMC, the number of research grants offered and the number of publications produced.
“We hope to ultimately build a lasting partnership and see vast improvement in health care policy and leadership,” said Geelea Seaford, assistant director of communications for DGHI.
Bartlett noted that this program is not meant to impose the American medical system on Tanzania. The program is not creating social policy he said, but rather “gives graduates tools to create informed careful health care policy for their country by turning research results into decisions.”
DGHI is not the only organization on campus that aims to aid the medical institutions in foreign nations.
“This is one branch of a bigger picture, a global effort to help international locales with their unique problems,” Seaford said. “The global strategy at Duke is to be a leader in medical advancement.”
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