Displaced Sudanese Medics Return After Training In Canada And Kenya

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Main Category: Public Health
Also Included In: Medical Students / Training
Article Date: 06 Sep 2008 - 0:00 PDT

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Eleven refugees, who left Sudan as children, were raised in Cuba, and educated in medicine in Canada, now return to Sudan, where they may help improve medical conditions, according to a Comment released on September 5, 2008 in The Lancet.

The authors of this piece, Dr Rodney Crutcher, Health Sciences Centre, University of Calgary, Canada, and colleagues, describe the story of these eleven students. In 1985, amidst war in the Sudan, they were chosen as a group of 600 children chosen to be educated in Cuba with the hopes of returning later in life. Grants were given to 25 students by the Cuban government for a medical education there, and then sent to Canada as refugees.

Of these graduates, 15 approached the Christian relief and development agency known as Samaritan's Purse Canada (SPC) to help them return to Sudan. The agency, realizing the magnitude of the support needed, further requested assistance from The University of Calgary, who further took on an extended education system to upgrade the students' clinical skills. This included courses in tropical medicine, clinical reasoning, professionalism, and language skills. This required a large set of resources, including 77 instructors and 69 doctors who had a part in the training. The second phase of the program was set in seven hospitals in Kenya and put together with consultation of the Kenyan government and significant funding from the US Agency for International Development and IMA World Health.

There were 11 graduates from the program who not work in Southern Sudan, many in remote areas. The authors say that this is a great step forward for many of these regions: "This success has meant new access to medical care including emergency surgery, perhaps most notably in the provision of life-saving caesarean sections. One such case was a patient in need of a caesarean section who had this procedure under local anaesthesia because the nearest available operating room would involve travelling by boat for four days."

The authors conclude, speculating on the success of this program: "Will this group of Sudanese Canadians work as physicians in Southern Sudan in the long term? We do not know. Yet despite severe challenges, they have convinced many of their commitment to remain. Through relationships forged along their journey, they have inspired others to commit time, medical donations, and other support to further their work in Southern Sudan. Such commitments include those from the University of Calgary to continue further medical education for them and to foster university-to-university relations with medical schools in Southern Sudan. The Sudanese Physician Reintegration Program, culminating in the Juba Graduation, represents a unique approach of a return of the diaspora. It is one way of helping Africans help Africans."

Sudanese physicians' reintegration programme
R. Crutcher, S.E. Shannon, J. Clayton, D.M.T. Duop
The Lancet, Vol 372, September 6, 2008
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Written by Anna Sophia McKenney
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