Family Medicine in Ethiopia: Lessons from a Global Collaboration.

BACKGROUND: Building the capacity of local health systems to provide high-quality, self-sustaining medical education and health care is the central purpose for many global health partnerships (GHPs). Since 2001, our global partner consortium collaborated to establish Family Medicine in Ethiopia; the first Ethiopian family physicians graduated in February 2016. METHODS: The authors, representing the primary Ethiopian, Canadian, and American partners in the GHP, identified obstacles, accomplishments, opportunities, errors, and observations from the years preceding residency launch and the first 3 years of the residency. RESULTS: Common themes were identified through personal reflection and presented as lessons to guide future GHPs. LESSON 1: Promote Family Medicine as a distinct specialty. LESSON 2: Avoid gaps, conflict, and redundancy in partner priorities and activities. LESSON 3: Building relationships takes time and shared experiences. LESSON 4: Communicate frequently to create opportunities for success. LESSON 5: Engage local leaders to build sustainable, long-lasting programs from the beginning of the partnership. CONCLUSIONS: GHPs can benefit individual participants, their organizations, and their communities served. Engaging with numerous partners may also result in challenges-conflicting expectations, misinterpretations, and duplication or gaps in efforts. The lessons discussed in this article may be used to inform GHP planning and interactions to maximize benefits and minimize mishaps.

The dawn of family medicine in Ethiopia.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: This article describes the development of the first training program in family medicine in Ethiopia that was launched on February 4, 2013, at Addis Ababa University (AAU). The postgraduate program will prepare highly trained doctors for all parts of the country who choose generalism for their lifelong career. The paper describes a series of strategies that were used from 2008 to 2013 to take the Ethiopian family medicine program from vision to reality. There is no single model for the development of family medicine in a country where it does not yet exist. In this case the strategies included Continuing Medical Education events, discussions with stakeholders, international collaboration, needs assessment, curriculum design, and faculty development. The article also reviews both the potential for a new program in family medicine to contribute to the country's health system plus the challenges that are expected in the early stages of establishing a new specialty. The challenges include the ambiguous roles of the family physician in the Ethiopian health care system, uncertainty about career opportunities, adaptation of the curriculum to address local needs, expansion of the training programs to produce larger numbers of family physicians, development of Ethiopian faculty who will be teachers of family medicine, and internal and external brain drain. Family physicians will need to maintain a respectful relationship with other specialist physicians as well as nonphysician primary care providers. The development of this AAU family medicine residency is an example of a successful inter- institutional relationship between local and international partners to create a sustainable, Ethiopian-led training program. Insights from this article may guide development of similar training programs.