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February 2011, Issue 10 |
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The TAAAC-EM Launch
In October 2010, the Division of Emergency Medicine made its first formal teaching trip to Ethiopia to help Addis Ababa University (AAU) train its first cohort of emergency medicine (EM) residents. This trip launched the Toronto Addis Ababa Academic Collaboration in Emergency Medicine (TAAAC-EM). Currently, Ethiopia faces the enormous challenge of providing 80 million people with basic health care amongst a critical health care worker shortage. In 2008 a delegation from AAU visited U of T to request an expanded educational collaboration between the two institutions, similar to the one developed by the Department of Psychiatry (the Toronto-Addis Ababa Psychiatry Project (TAAPP)) that has increased the number of Ethiopian psychiatrists from nine to 34 in the past five years. This endeavour has created a self-sustaining mass of educators currently engaged in spreading psychiatric care from the capital throughout the country; and has made Ethiopia a pre-eminent site for psychiatric teaching in a low-resource setting. The faculty at AAU and U of T have published widely on the subject. The academic leadership of AAU identified several key areas for collaboration which included emergency medicine as there are currently no formally trained EM physicians in Ethiopia. TAAAC-EM has been designed with the support of the Department of Family and Community Medicine and the Department of Medicine under the Division of Emergency Medicine to support the training of EM residents at AAU throughout their three-year training. Teams of two University of Toronto staff and a resident will be travelling to Ethiopia for a month at a time, three times a year and are responsible for delivering the didactic lectures, bedside supervision, skills labs and journal clubs. The intention is to continue with dedicated teaching trips through to the graduation of enough EM faculty to allow the education of future postgraduates to be accomplished by the EM specialists trained at AAU. The first cohort is set to graduate in 2013. Drs. Cheryl Hunchak, Nazanin Meshkat and James Maskalyk took the first teaching trip in October 2010. The first group of residents gave overwhelmingly positive feedback. The next team, led by Drs Megan Landes and Raghu Venugopal, are set to leave for the month of February. For more information in how to participate in Canada or in a teaching trip please contact taaac.em@gmail.com. To follow our teams in Ethiopia you can read our blog.
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