The East African nation Eritrea has eight obstetrician-gynecologists for a population of 5 million. It’s a critical shortfall, and one that the Partnership for Eritrea — a joint venture between the GW Medical Center, nonprofit organization Physicians for Peace and the Eritrean government — is working to remedy.
Eritrea, a country bordering the Red Sea that is roughly the size of Pennsylvania, has one of the lowest physician rates in all of Africa. When the Partnership for Eritrea was formed in 2006, there were three physicians per 100,000 people, compared with the United States’ ratio of 293 people per physician.
This fall, the partnership added a residency program in obstetrics-gynecology to its graduate medical education programs — joining the surgical and pediatrics programs already underway at Eritrea’s Orotta School of Medicine. The partnership selected Susan Marzolf, a physician who is earning an M.P.H. in global health, as the director of the new obstetrics-gynecology residency program. “We felt with her experience as a practicing ob-gyn and her studies in global health she would be a great fit for the new residency program,” says Huda Ayas, executive director of GW’s International Medicine Programs, who has been handling the Medical Center’s day-to-day coordination of the project and developing an implementation plan.
Founded in 2003, the school will graduate its first class of approximately 31 medical students in December. Completing their training alongside those medical students will be the program’s first class of pediatric residents, nearly tripling the nation’s existing total of trained pediatricians.
Six Eritrean general practitioners were selected for the obstetrics-gynecology residency program. The group is participating in an abbreviated residency because they come to the program with as much as 10 to 15 years of previous medical experience. Subsequent classes of residents will be composed primarily of new graduates from Orotta School of Medicine. “A goal of the country is to reduce the maternal death rate,” explains Dr. Ayas. “We believe this residency program will help achieve that goal.”
The Eritrean government also recently approved a fourth residency program — internal medicine — and the Partnership for Eritrea is now in the process of developing the curriculum expected to start next summer.
This article is adapted from one that appeared in GW Progress.