I am a third-year internal medicine resident at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas. I completed medical school at University of Miami and have dedicated my spare time to providing access to underserved populations in the US and abroad.
I plan on traveling with co-residents, fellows, and faculty from UT Austin to Eldoret, Kenya to work with the Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare (AMPATH) Kenya in March-April 2023. The AMPATH model is based on partnership, reciprocity, and collaboration. AMPATH’s mission is to build sustainable, holistic health care in western Kenya and around the world. AMPATH executes this via cross-cultural collaborative direct patient care, research, and education. The organization empowers local communities through its premise of reciprocity. For example, Moi university medical students will also have the opportunity to travel to Austin, Texas and work alongside UT medical students to deliver direct patient care in the US for approximately 6 weeks.
I will be working with a team of trainees of a similar education level at the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital and at outpatient clinics in Eldoret, Kenya. We will provide value-based care in a low resource setting. I plan to share my knowledge of internal medicine and contribute to seminars led by UT faculty on point of care ultrasound (POCUS). If the POCUS teaching sessions are successful, we hope to fundraise to purchase several handheld ultrasound devices for the Internal Medicine department in Eldoret.
AMPATH Kenya has served 8,000,000 Kenyans and trained 2600+ health professionals and community healthcare workers. Through this program, our project will serve patients at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Eldoret, Kenya. Both the patients and trainees at this facility will benefit from my team’s knowledge, and from the utilization and skills learned from point of care ultrasound. The Kenyan medical students and residents will also benefit from interacting with US colleagues in Kenya, and a select few Moi trainees will get the opportunity to work alongside clinicians in the United States.
I hope to work in advocacy, civic engagement, and global health throughout my career. In this line of work, it is essential to understand the issues faced by healthcare systems in the United States and abroad. Some say that the world has "become flat" in the 21st century. Consequently, healthcare problems in one part of the world now have a global effect. In my practice, I will address this care gap by working both in the United States and by volunteering abroad. I will contribute to the development of accessible, culturally appropriate models of care throughout my career.
My personal interest is in hospital medicine. I hope to gain significant insights about the inner workings of the Kenyan healthcare system and its ability to provide comprehensive care to such a large population despite limited resources. I believe this will impact my ideas of delivery of care in the United States. Experiencing different methods of healthcare delivery will propel me to challenge the status quo and innovate healthcare delivery in resource limited systems.
During my time at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital, I worked closely with local Kenyan healthcare providers, medicine residents, and students. I was able to collaborate with the host community in a respectful and meaningful way and constantly learned from the Kenyan providers. I was able to help the Kenyan residents also known as "registrars" provide high value care to patients in a resource limited setting. I supported the hospital work flow contributing to rounds, consults, discharges, and procedures.
I learned how to use medical technology like POCUS to guide my clinical reasoning and was able to teach the Moi medical students through POCUS workshop. I worked in a multidisciplinary, multicultural team which consisted of medical students, medicine residents, and pharmacy students from different parts of Kenya and the U.S.
