What We're Doing in Kigali

I had meant to write more before now. Oh well. Here goes…..
I might write a few installments for the next few days…..

Since arriving in Kigali, I’ve been doing a number of things. Let me start with why I am here in case I haven’t told some of you. I’ll try to cover some of the other things I’ve done in later posts.

Another medical student (Amy Willis) and I are working on a project with our faculty advisor in Rwanda. Our faculty advisor (Dr. Inis Bardella) is a family medicine doctor who is currently working on medical education in Rwanda. She works for the Univ of Colorado (UC Denver) and is currently the main liason for cooperative effort between the Univ of Colo and the National University of Rwanda (NUR) to improve their post graduate medical education programs. (In the U.S., we usually call this residency training, and this is where a doctor completes his or her specialty training such as pediatrics, orthopedic surgery, etc.) Basically the scoop in Rwanda is that the country has a shortage of practicing doctors. During the Rwandan genocide in 1994, many doctors either fled or were killed. Additionally, the medical education system has been recovering. Not only has their been a shortage of practicing docs but also a shortage of faculty. So, the University of Colorado received a grant from US-AID (US Agency for International Development) about 2.5 years ago to help NUR with their post-graduate medical education programs (residencies) to help create a sustainable solution to their shortage of doctors and faculty.

To help out UC Denver has been doing many things. For example, they’ve helped to create a new post-grad program (Family and Community Medicine – FAMCO) and they’ve been providing visiting faculty to teach needed areas.

Amy and I will be working on a project within this larger project. We are working with Dr. Bardella to help provide reference resources to these post-graduate doctors that are working on their specialty training. A general assessment of their resources revealed that they were extremely limited by our standards. Their books and journals are out of date. Their internet is slow …. And that’s when it works because the electricity is frequently out. So, the idea is that we wanted to provide resources that these doctors could carry with them and be chalked full of info.

To do this, we will be providing them with PDA’s (personal digital assistants….How many of you thought Public Display of Affection??? Get your mind out of the gutter!) These PDA’s will have medical reference programs on them that will have searchable info for the doctors to use. Then they can be connected to the internet from time to time to be updated, so that they do not go out of date.

We’ll be collecting info on how they use them and publish the results. The World Health Organization is developing applications for different regions of the world for this type of use. The idea is that our results will help to define how these resources are developed to help future medical students and post-graduates.

We’re doing this with all of the post graduates in the country which are spread out amongst 4 different cities and we’ll be traveling to each of them. In fact, I’m headed to Ruhengeri this week from Tuesday until Friday. We’ll be meeting some of the FAMCO residents and I’ll probably be doing some clinical work with them as well.

So that’s what we’re doing.
I'll be posting more in the next day or two.