Pediatrics and Child Health

The Department of Paediatrics and Child Health at Mbarara University of Science and Technology is a busy clinical department offering undergraduate and postgraduate training and research as well as tertiary patient care services at Mbarara Regional Referral Hospital. It has grown in all its core functions – teaching/medical training, research and service delivery over the last 3 decades.

Vision

To be a recognized Centre of Excellence in East Africa for specialized tertiary paediatric care, high quality training and research in paediatrics and child health

Mission

To provide high quality medical care to children, train highly competent health professionals capable of providing high quality and locally appropriate health care to patients and to conduct relevant health research for the benefit of the community.

Undergraduate MBChB training

The department offers undergraduate MBChB training in Paediatrics and Child Health to about 200 medical students every year. Training is based on a well-developed semester based curriculum and focuses on clinical skills, child health, tropical childhood illnesses and important causes of childhood morbidity and mortality. In addition, undergraduate students from other departments in the Faculty of Medicine, collaborating institutions and universities are also trained here.

Postgraduate Master of Medicine training

Postgraduate training is offered to candidates who have completed MBChB undergraduate training and meet stipulated requirements for admission into the Master of Medicine in Paediatrics and Child Health. The training programme is high quality, very intense and mainly based on apprenticeship in advanced clinical patient care, modular curriculum courses covering a whole range of specialities in paediatrics and child health, and regular student assessment.  A high quality research dissertation is one of the major requirements for the award of the masters’ degree under this programme. Visiting subspecialists from collaborating universities provide additional support and training in different modules. So far over 20 paediatricians have been trained since the programme started 15 years ago. We aim to have up to 10 admissions into the programme every year.

Clinical services

As part of Mbarara Regional Referral Hospital, the department provides tertiary in-patient care to about 5,000 children in the south western region of Uganda, annually. About 45% of these are new-borns. An additional 25,000 sick children are seen in the paediatric outpatient department annually. Currently, the department is focusing on developing subspecialty services in different clinical areas. Cardiology, neonatology and oncology are among the priority areas. Through some charity grants, we are able to offset hospital stock outs of essential medicines and sundries so that services to patients run uninterrupted all year round. The current in-patient mortality rate is at 7% and continues to decline.

Research

The department and staff actively conduct high quality collaborative research and publications. Some of the studies done in the department have contributed to international policy decisions. Research partners include Epicentre/MSF (France), Pennsylvania State University and Massachusetts General Hospital (USA), University of British Columbia (Canada), Oxford University (UK), Ghent University (Belgium) among others, with funding from NIH, European Union, WHO, etc.  Areas of research have included infectious diseases (Malaria, Tuberculosis, HIV, CNS infections, childhood sepsis, new-born infections etc.), community child health etc. Postgraduate research also contributes a significant share of research activities

Collaborations

The department has developed and benefited from a number of collaborations with institutions and universities in and outside Uganda in areas of research, service delivery and teaching/training. Notable ones include

1. Epicentre/MSF, France
2. Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, USA
3. Pennsylvania State University, USA
4. University of Oxford, UK
5. Ghent University, Belgium
6. The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, UK
7. University of British Columbia, Canada
8. University of Calgary, Canada
9. Bristol Children’s Hospital, UK
10. Uganda Paediatric Association
11. Rotary Club International and Rotary Clubs of Mbarara, Calgary South, Halifax,

A co-creation laboratory for the Collaboration for Affordable Medical Technologies (CAMTech) has been born out of collaborative work with members of the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health.

The Paediatrics Oncology Department

Mbarara Regional Referral Hospital (MRRH), located in the southwestern town of Mbarara, is a public, government-funded hospital and serves as a teaching hospital for the Faculty of Medicine at Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST), the second oldest public medical school in the country. The 600-bed capacity of MRRH includes the inpatient wards for Internal Medicine, Surgery, Pediatrics, Malnutrition, OB/GYN, Psychiatry, and Emergency. In addition to the large number of adults seeking medical services at MRRH, there is a significant caseload of children who need care, including those with cancer. However, the current Oncology Unit alone is not suited to children, as they need their own space tailored to their needs to ensure they have adequate care.

To address the unmet need for pediatric oncology care facilities and training programs, Massachusetts General Hospital Global Health, in collaboration with MUST and MRRH, supported the construction of a dedicated pediatric oncology building that will serve as a center for training and service delivery. Specifically, this new unit incorporates an outpatient clinic and 16inpatient beds; it also serves as a venue for training doctors and nurses in pediatric oncology.

Dedicated nurses are needed to spearhead start-up of the pediatric oncology initiative at the new facility, therefore two BNS nurses are being recruited to fill this role. MGH will fund their salaries for two year so that they can dedicate themselves full-time to these critical positions. After two years, Mbarara Regional Referral Hospital is expected to take up payment of their salaries