With the Human Resources for Health (HRH) initiative, Rwanda is establishing the first large-scale, sustainable health workforce training program in the country. The program creates a source of locally trained physicians who will work with Rwanda’s newly launched EMS system to provide emergency and acute care for a population with great need. Candidates come from district and referral hospitals from around the country.
The training was initially divided into a two-tiered system. The first tier consisted of a two-year, part-time postgraduate diploma (PGD) course in Emergency and Critical Care Medicine. The first class of PGD candidates began their training in September of 2013. The second tier recruited graduates from the PGD course to continue on with their training for another three years to earn a Masters of Medicine in Emergency Medicine.
Recently, there has been a change to the duration of the training–emergency medicine is now a full-time, four-year training program at the public referral clinic in the capital Kigali’s University Teaching Hospital (CHUK). There, students receive instruction from board-certified EM physicians from the US, UK, and Canada who provide both direct supervision of patient care in the emergency department and eight hours of didactic teaching (lectures or simulations) per week. The program now has access to Rosh Review’s question bank to further enhance students’ learning.
Rwanda graduated it’s first six locally trained emergency medicine specialists on November 2, 2018. They have all been deployed to teaching hospitals across the country.