My co-resident (Alexandria Riopelle) and I will be traveling to Rwanda to collaborate with local physicians and medical school instructors in Kigali. We will precept medical students at (University of Global Health Equity) UGHE and teach at bedside or in the clinic. In addition, we will facilitate classroom sessions and help teach medical students exam skills with patients in the hospital. Long-term, we will continue to maintain a partnership with the UGHE and help create classroom materials, provide mentorship to students and young physicians and coordinate opportunities for other residents/faculty to visit UGHE.
The Rwandan community will benefit from this project from direct collaboration with myself and Dr. Riopelle so that we may assist in empowering medical students and early career physicians to grow in their careers. This will provide Rwanda with more health care professionals who will provide a valuable service to their community. In addition, this trip will provide a positive impact to our own community in the BU dermatology residency program as we will bring back lessons learned from the trip and help to encourage other residency members to continue endeavors for years to come.
The expected impact will be to provide sustainable teaching endeavors to help the community empower itself to graduate physicians who will provide a valuable service to their country. After we return we will provide a presentation to our residency program and further these relationships to help create a sustainable program that will seek to continue collaboration and potentially allow for the cross-cultural exchange of information and learning. Our goal would be to create enough traction to eventually fund the ability for a few Rwandan students to come to Boston University and learn in our program to then bring this back to their institution.
The medical students at UGHE were most impacted by our trip as we spent a week teaching and precepting in clinic with them. We also interacted with patients and provided clinical care and assisted with making sustainable changes to the medical school curriculum within the dermatology clerkship to allow for students to have more hands on experience in this field. Many of these medical students will go on to become general practitioners and will need to have a large breadth of knowledge on a variety of conditions in order to better serve the large patient population in Rwanda. During our week we helped to provide a framework by which non-dermatologists can be helpful in both identifying and treating dermatologic conditions and helping to provide a better clinical flow for patients.
