We plan to bring a team of anesthesia residents and attendings to Fame Medical Health Center in Tanzania to support local staff members and provide training for certified nurse anesthesia providers. Rather than performing cases ourselves, our goal is to support the local staff in their learning and improve perioperative medicine at Fame in order to build local capacity, especially as the hospital works to expand and increase the number of surgeries they are able to perform each year. We will provide daily lectures, support in the operating rooms, assist in teaching during morning rounds, run simulations, and perform hands-on ultrasound workshops. As Fame provides a wide variety of care, our teaching will range from general OR cases, pediatric cases, perioperative pain control, regional anesthesia, high risk OB, ICU care, and trauma cases. Our anesthesia team is working with local providers to find specific topics that their staff will benefit the most from. Our goal is to make a lasting improvement in the care that is delivered at Fame by providing them with more tools in the perioperative period. For instance, FAME sees many traumatic injuries and often performs orthopedic surgeries. Their anesthesia staff is interested in learning more about ultrasound guided regional anesthesia for pain control and we plan to hold workshops in order to provide training and improvement in their regional anesthesia techniques.
Fame Medical Health Center is located in rural northern Tanzania and serves over 37,000 patients a year with a catchment area of more than 3 million. As Fame is the largest medical center in the area and serves a large number of extremely underserved and rural patients, people often travel for hours or days to receive their care, often overcoming many obstacles along the way. We hope to help local anesthesia practitioners expand and improve quality of care to the members of their communities. Like many others around the world, those surrounding the Karatu district are a vastly underserved population and often lack appropriate medical care, education, and follow up. Preventable and easily treatable diseases in this region are often fatal due to limited access to care. However, Fame is starting to change this by filling critical gaps in care needs around the region including pediatric care, emergency services, obstetrics, and surgical and anesthetic care. Although local providers such as local dispensaries and traditional birth attendants have been an incredible resource in serving their communities for many decades, the more advanced care that Fame is now able to offer is also vital to keeping the local communities safe and healthy. We are honored to be able to contribute to their growth of ongoing sustainable care for Tanzanians.
Our time spent teaching at Fame will benefit local anesthesia practitioners along with the patients they serve. In addition, it will benefit the next generation of anesthesia providers as we hope this teaching and knowledge will be passed on to new providers as the medical center continues to expand their capacity and reach.
The impact of this project will last long after our trip is complete because our goal is to teach high yield and practical knowledge that will improve the quality of anesthesia care at the medical center. One of the reasons why Fame has been successful and continued to grow over the years is that they have implemented an educational and training program into their strategic planning goals. Our job will be to support the education of the hospital’s six certified nurse anesthesia providers, who provide anesthesia for over 1,200 surgeries that occur each year at Fame. Our goal is to provide teaching and tangible ideas that will not only improve care for patients but also be easily implemented into the larger educational program for future anesthesia providers. This will ensure that impact will continue far beyond our presence and ultimately result in safer and higher quality care for many years. Some of these benefits include better pain control through more regional blocks and use of adjunct pain medication, safer anesthesia techniques for pediatric populations, anesthesia for high risk OB patients, improved survival in difficult airway situations, and cardiac and trauma life support. The hospital’s leading priority for the last couple of years has been to expand surgical services in both number, type, and complexity of surgery. We hope to be able to assist local practitioners in sustainably expanding knowledge and lowering gaps in care for rural Tanzanians.
