For the past few months, the current mess in Eastern DRC has largely dominated the news on Rwanda.Though the crisis is entirely a Congolese affair and by the Congolese themselves, you wouldn’t rule out the possibility of some innocent souls mistaking the conflict to be an outright war between Kigali and Kinshasa.That has been the successful work of a closely-knit network of individuals wrongly dubbed ‘experts’ and yet their expertise only extends to how they can sustain an evil trade of enriching themselves as Congolese keep in misery.In fact, as opposed to being experts, they are in reality, scavengers. Today let’s not waste time on this mess. I will go to the good news.This week marked the beginning of a groundbreaking programme, where Rwanda will see her doctors, nurses, midwives and hospital managers train side by side with their counterparts drawn from different university teaching hospitals in the US.Under what government has called, the Human Resources for Health (HRH) programme, this country will receive close to 100 experienced and well qualified physicians, nurses and midwives as well as hospital managers from almost 13 leading US universities.They will primarily do two important things.First, this group is composed of physicians who have been professors in various disciplines of medicine. Their first role is to work with the National University of Rwanda’s faculty of medicine and our teaching hospitals to train our young doctors in various areas of specialisation.Therefore, instead of spending millions on training a few of doctors from abroad (we have almost 80 out) at a very high cost, this time, we will have these professors come down to train many more at a reasonable cost.The beauty of this programme is far from the cost alone. It’s also about the advantages of training people here while taking stock of the realistic situation on the ground as opposed to overseas where the health care systems are different. The numbers targeted at the end of the seven-year programme will certainly set Rwanda on the course of providing world-class health care if the momentum is maintained.Today, Rwanda has slightly above 660 physicians including both general practioners and specialists for a population of about 12 million. As of 2011, the ratio of doctors to population stood at 1:15,000. The same gap exists with nurses and midwives with a ratio of 1 nurse for every 1,500 people.Yet under Vision 2020, we target a ratio of one doctor for 1000 people and one nurse for 500 people.Much as these targets sound ambitious and the HRH programme might not necessarily get us to these desired ratios, this initiative sets us on the course of realising this vision and provides the most realistic solution.As targeted, at the end of the seven-year programme, we should have trained at least 500 new specialists in areas of internal medicine, surgery, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, pathology, anesthesiology and emergency medicine. We should also have increased the number of qualified nurses by almost 54 per cent.Increasing the numbers is one thing. The other is the twinning programme – meaning that these specialists from the US will be allocated or twinned with Rwandan specialists to work together on a daily basis. They will act as mentors for their Rwandan colleagues by sharing their experiences and best practices.The end result will be sharpening skills of our specialists and increasing their capacity to handle more complicated cases, hence enabling government to cut on the huge budget spent on foreign referrals. As years go by, the number of Americans will decline over time as newly trained Rwandan faculty members assume teaching and mentorship roles.Nowhere, in the history of global health care has such an initiative been implemented. Therefore, Rwanda has no room for failure because the stakes are high. The success of this programme will motivate the rollout of similar initiatives across the continent.It will be a shame if our physicians make themselves ‘busy’ and fail to seize these opportunities. To earn an extra buck, quite often some of our specialists engage in other side activities out of their routine clinical schedules within their hospitals. This might leave them with limited time for the mentorship programme, rendering these visiting professors idle. We can only hope that such incidences do not occur.Putting this aside, as mentioned earlier, the revolution that is going to be created by this HRH initiative, should spur this nation on the course of being a hub for world-class medical care on the continent.But to create a world-class health care system will need more than just the numbers of physicians. The attitudes and the manner in which health care providers deliver their services must change.That way, our people and those we seek to attract, will have confidence in seeking our health care services as opposed to flocking elsewhere.On twitter @aasiimwe
