How did you become involved with AMPATH?

Easter: We were approached by a current UVA resident who wanted to know if UVA would join the consortium. AMPATH was looking in particular for Emergency Medicine, because they didn’t have any Emergency Medicine specialists. Emergency Medicine is an emerging area in Kenya. The first Emergency Medicine training programs started recently in Nairobi and Moi and UVA will join the consortium. This will mean research and clinical exchanges on both sides, with mutual benefit.

Was global medical education an area of focus before your collaboration with AMPATH? What made you choose AMPATH?

Sudhir: I went into medicine to do Global Health. I chose Emergency Medicine because I thought it would lend itself well to Global Health, because it’s fairly universal. However, I found that a lot of emergency positions do short clinical trips without long-term impact. I spent the first fifteen years of my career as an educator and now I have the opportunity to offer that education to programs developing those services. We have been approached by other NGOs and other governments about possible collaborations, but the infrastructure to support the collaboration didn’t exist, whereas with AMPATH the infrastructure is already set up. Also, Moi’s hospital is a tertiary care center in a town in a rural area and attached to a public research university, just like UVA, which is interesting to us.

Easter: Early on in my career I did a fair amount of Global Health. For me, the appeal of the collaboration with AMPATH is that, because Emergency Medicine is still in its infancy in Kenya, there is an opportunity to have a major impact.

Cultural competency and differing access to resources are such important things to address within these international exchanges, how does that play into the design of this training program?

Sudhir: One thing that is particularly appealing about this program is that it is completely driven by the Kenyans. Moi faculty are working with the Ministry of Health, and - and tell us specifically what they would like us to teach. That helps with the problems of cultural competency because they are determining what they need themselves.

Easter: A difference between here and Kenya is that in the U.S. we rely on expensive, resource-dependent interventions. That’s not possible in Kenya, so we have to factor in resource utilization more than we do in the U.S. For example, in the case of a patient for whom we would use a ventilator in the U.S., in Kenya, we had to see if there were enough breathing machines available first. If there weren’t, an alternative would be found. We can bring that approach back to the U.S. to use in extreme cases, like COVID.

What are the next steps for UVA’s collaboration with AMPATH?

Easter:  Long term, we’d like to support the training of a cadre of Kenyan physicians practicing Emergency Medicine.

Sudhir:  This could expand to other disciplines. Hopefully, Kenyan students will start coming in the fall. We’re looking for a Kenyan student or faculty member to be an observer of the toxicology team at UVA. From now on, we hope to make these trips annually. We were originally funded by UVA’s Center of Global Health Equity. Now, a group of donors, EMCERT (Emergency Medicine Center for Education, Research, and Technology), will fund our trips to Kenya and for two Kenyans to come to Charlottesville. After two years, we hope to find further funding.