One hundred and twenty patients have been operated on at Ruhengeri Hospital in Musanze District as part of the University Teaching Hospital of Kigali (CHUK) surgical outreach programme.

The week-long annual outreach, that closed last Friday, is the 10th since it was launched in June 2015 by CHUK with the support of the Ministry of Health, aiming at significantly reducing the lengthy waiting lists for surgeries.

The initiative saw the selection of three sites which have been used for the surgical outreach programme, including Ruhengeri, Rwamagana, and Ngoma hospitals.

A three month pilot phase of the project, that ran from June to September 2015, saw 2174 patients benefit from the drive.

Statistics from CHUK show that approximately 4450 patients have benefited from the programme since its launch.

The surgical outreach week does not have specific date since it is carried out depending on the number of patients that are in need of surgeries across the country.

This time round, doctors mainly carried out orthopaedic surgeries.

Dr Arcade Rudakemwa, an anaesthesiologist from CHUK, in an interview with journalists, explained that the purpose of the outreach programme is to move closer patients, operate on them near their homes and relatives as well as reduce the expenses they would spend on transport to Kigali.

"We find them where they are and offer them the services from there to cut the distance they would take to come to the hospital in Kigali,” he said.

He, however, noted that they face challenges related to inadequacy of equipment.

"The equipment is not enough, for example, the room we are using is meant for the operation of one person at a time, but we divide it into two rooms which means that in one room we don’t have an anaesthesiology machine at the time when we are using it in the other room,” he said.

He added that another problem they face is that they remain a small team even when combined with the hospital staff which makes it hard for them to follow up on the patients on whom they have performed surgical operations.

Dr Léon Ngezahayo, the Director of Clinical Services at Ruhengeri Hospital, referred to the initiative as "a special campaign” that has seen many patients treated in a short period of time.

"There was a problem of many patients and a few doctors, a fact which made the CHUK team come in to help. They use a lot of energy power to perform many surgeries and things are getting better,” he said.

Zilbah Nyirabahutu, 54-year old Musanze resident who received an operation on the throat, said that the outreach had helped her to be treated near her home where she can receive care in terms of food and other needs from her family.

Jean Damascene Sempabuka, a resident of Ngororero, another beneficiary who received an operation on his belly, said the initiative is cost effective in terms of transport that would otherwise be spent on going to CHUK for treatment.

In his closing remarks, the state minister for public and primary healthcare, Dr Patrick Ndimubanzi, promised that the outreach campaign will continue in referral and provincial hospitals in order to administer surgical operations to patients near their home areas.

On human resource, Ndimubanzi said that up to 250 doctors are currently studying different medical specilialties in and out of Rwanda, expected to narrow the gap.

In addition to these, he said, every year over 100 doctors graduate in general medicine.

"We are confident that in the coming years we shall be having enough doctors working in Ruhengeri Hospital and other referrals in the country,” he said.

According to Ndimubanzi, the patient to doctor ratio in the country is approximately one doctor per 100,000 patients.

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