US program aims to transform medical research and education in Africa
Earlier this month, US and African global health leaders hosted the inaugural meeting of a program that aims to transform and increase medical education in Africa. Called the Medical Education Partnership Initiative (MEPI), the program assists institutions in sub-Saharan African countries that receive support from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and its partners to develop and enhance models of medical education. MEPI helps support PEPFAR’s goals of increasing the number of new health care workers by 140,000, strengthening medical education systems, and building clinical research capacity in Africa. MEPI also aims to help retain faculty at African medical schools and clinical professors on the continent.
The initiative will provide up to $130 million over five years in grants to African institutions in 12 countries. The funding will help form a network of approximately 30 regional partners, country health and education ministries, and more than 20 US collaborators. Ambassador Eric Goosby, who serves as the US Global AIDS Coordinator, said that MEPI will help form partnerships between African and US medical schools by "really fostering and strengthening a collegial network" to empower medical professionals in Africa, which shoulders one of the highest HIV/AIDS epidemics worldwide and a heavy burden of other chronic diseases.
The Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Health Services Research Administration partner with PEPFAR on the MEPI program. After the inaugural meeting, NIH Director Francis Collins said it was "history to have all these medical education leaders in the room." Collins added, "They represented 30 different African institutions, and they made it clear they had never been together. They were talking about building capacity for the training of researchers and medical educators. The sense of electricity in the room was phenomenal. That portrays a real opportunity across the continent that hadn’t been there before."
"It’s very important to support African clinicians and researchers directly because they are closest to the problems and they see the problems on the frontlines," Michael Johnson, deputy director of the Fogarty Center, said in a recent interview. He added, "If a patient is not responding to a treatment for HIV or tuberculosis, they are going to be the first to recognize and be able to study the cause of the problem."
Through MEPI, "African doctors are going to learn from each other and share clinical and research approaches to improving the care of their patients," Johnson added. "There is no place on earth that has a greater shortage of doctors than in Africa. This program intends to train more doctors, and to help newly trained doctors have access to the best clinical knowledge.It will also help doctors to conduct applied research that is best suited to improving the care of their patients in ways that fit with local needs and resources."
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