March 2007

GW Medical Center to Help Train Doctors in Eritrea

By Zak M. Salih

With only five pediatricians, five surgeons, and four obstetricians serving a country of nearly five million, Eritrea stands to benefit significantly from a new partnership between the GW Medical Center and international nonprofit Physicians for Peace.
Under the partnership, U.S. surgeons and pediatricians will work with their Eritrean counterparts to establish residency training programs at the Orotta School of Medicine in the capital city of Asmara. The programs will be funded by Physicians for Peace, and U.S. physicians will spend a year or more as faculty. Additionally, pediatricians with specialized expertise will visit in one- to two-week shifts to teach students, take care of patients, and provide consultations.

The goal of this new project, according to School of Medicine and Health Sciences Dean James Scott, is to help change the African country’s health care system. “There was a feeling within the Medical Center, and certainly by me, of finding a project that was sustainable over a long period of time,” he says.

For the last 30 years, Eritrean medical students have depended on foreign residencies to receive their specialized training, much of which is not culture specific to their country. The result has been for graduates to remain abroad instead of returning home to practice medicine.

Doctors who complete this new program will be trained with local resources with the hope that they will remain to practice medicine in Eritrea. The curriculum will be modified to fit the local needs of equipment, knowledge, skills, and disease demographics. The training will not make these doctors eligible to take foreign medical board exams.

“We want to train them to a very high standard that’s specific to Eritrea, which gives them an extraordinary skill level, but falls short of making them marketable on an international level,” says Scott.

With its low physician-to-patient ratio and rampant cases of tropical infectious diseases, tuberculosis, and childbirth issues, Eritrea is the perfect country to test this model, according to Huda Ayas, executive director of GW’s International Medicine Program. “Eritrea has all the right components,” she says, referring to the dedication of the people, the relative safety of the country, and its manageable population size.

Ayas will be part of a team traveling to Eritrea in April to select faculty and residents, make arrangements for housing, and pave the way for the official start in July. Once the basic needs are met, the goal is to establish four residencies over the next two years in medicine, surgery, pediatrics, and obstetrics.

The upcoming experience has much to offer GW faculty as well, who will be working with a minimal amount of resources in the developing country.
“It makes you really appreciate what you have here and makes you a little more sensitive,” says Ayas. “Our faculty will see things it isn’t used to seeing here.”

Should the project prove successful, Scott hopes other foundations and institutions will continue to support medical training in sub-Saharan Africa. “If everybody took on one of these, we could show that this is a model for training manpower that stays and practices medicine in its own country,” he says.

“This is not about politics,” adds Ayas. “This is about medicine diplomacy.”

Send feedback to: bygeorge@gwu.edu