Ethiopia needs more physicians and staff working in EM. The Emergency Medicine and Critical Care (EMCC) department at the Addis Ababa Burn Emergency and Trauma (AaBET) Hospital, a public hospital under St. Paul’s Hospital Millennium Medical College (SPHMMC), is continuously working to improve the number and quality of graduating specialists. The department is currently running three programs: an EMCC residency, an undergraduate EM attachment, and a joint program with a nursing MSc in paramedics.
SPHMMC was established in 2010, although the medical school opened in 2007 and the hospital was established in 1968 by the late Emperor Haile Selassie. SPHMMC initiated Ethiopia’s first integrated modular and hybrid problem-based curriculum for its undergraduate medical education, and it is currently expanding to postgraduate programs and diversifying its undergraduate program offerings. SPHMMC is in the process of building its capacity quickly in a short period of time, growing from 3 to 250 faculty members in the last 6 years and expanding teaching facilities. The vision is to become a medical university with a prestigious academic and research center and sought-after medical care. For this, SPHMMC has identified three strategic themes: Excellence in Teaching and Research, Excellence in Service Delivery, and Excellence in Leadership and Governance.
The college has more than 2,800 clinical, academic, and administrative and support staff members who provide medical specialty services to patients referred from all over the country, teach medical and nursing students, and do basic and applied research. While the inpatient capacity is more than 700 beds, the college sees an average of 1,200 emergency and outpatient clients daily.
In 2015, AaBET was inaugurated as a public hospital under SPHMMC, and it is one of the first health sectors with an entire trauma and burn unit. The hospital has more than 200 beds and around 800 staff. It includes departments in EMCC, Neurosurgery, and Orthopedics and Traumatology, and an academic program in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. The EMCC department was established with the purpose of providing patient-centered quality care, running innovative training programs, and performing problem-solving research in the areas of emergency, trauma, and related fields to transform the care and training provided to a higher level. It became recognized as a fully fledged academic department in 2015.
Since the EMCC department was established, it has produced the first batch of 8 EM specialists, who are currently working at SPHMMC, AaBEF, and other emergency centers. The program’s intake capacity originally ranged from 9 residents per year, and it grew to 22 residents in 2019, including 2 residents from Sudan. Currently, there are more than 52 residents specializing in the field.
All of the graduates from the EMCC department are involved in setting up new programs, research, and leadership, and Rosh Review will be an invaluable tool to further improve evidence-based medical training. It will benefit the program as a tool for free open access medical education as well as for residents’ CME.