Can’t Africans abroad transfer skills online?
Apr 10, 2007
OVER the Easter weekend, while visiting my brother Dr. Richard Oloya and his family in Canton in northeastern Ohio, USA, I got a chance to see the newly built Birth Center wing at the Aultman Hospital where he works as a senior neonatologist. I could not help wondering whether there is a place for h
PERSPECTIVE OF A UGANDAN IN CANADA
Opiyo Oloya
OVER the Easter weekend, while visiting my brother Dr. Richard Oloya and his family in Canton in northeastern Ohio, USA, I got a chance to see the newly built Birth Center wing at the Aultman Hospital where he works as a senior neonatologist caring for premature babies. The centre offers the advanced Newborn Intensive Care Unit (NICU), delivering specialised care for premature and high-risk babies.
The last time I went through the hospital on a similar tour six or seven years ago, the preemies (as premature babies are known) were housed in one large brightly-lit room. Even then, the babies, some of them the size of my fist, were being cared for in fairly advanced incubators that allowed them to mature before being sent home with their relieved parents.
This time around, the NICU rooms are private, fitted with the $50,000 Giraffe OmniBed Incubator, a highly advanced state of the art technology with innovative design that provides perfectly controlled and monitored healing environment for intensively ill infants.
Inside the see-though Plexiglas cot with telescoping canopy, the baby is monitored around the clock by an array of computer monitors that check the lung capacity, heart-beat, weight, temperature, moisture, and how much nutrition is being absorbed into the body. Doctors can x-ray and operate on the infant right inside the Giraffe.
I trailed my brother on his round as another doctor and a nurse provided him the latest report on each baby.
When we reached a room where a nurse was busy with a very tiny infant, the report was not so good. The baby boy weighed a mere 800 grammes (1.7 pounds) when he was born, had briefly dropped about 200 grammes before stabilising at about a kilogramme or so. But, now, there were indications that he was gaining too much weight, and was also showing irregular heart beat, not to mention the sores he had developed on his backside as a result of the nurse cleaning the fragile skin. He needed to be monitored closely.
It is now possible to care for babies born at 23 weeks of pregnancy (around five months), my brother told me. “Of course, with these premature babies, it is all a balancing act—you cannot do too much of anything, feed them too much nutrition or force open their lungs with the ventilator because you will kill them,†he said. “As doctors, we work hard to keep them alive, but sometimes when all the indications are that the child has zero chance of quality life outside the hospital, the family chooses to unhook it from the machine to allow for quick exit.â€
Still, looking at my brother at his work, which he seemed to enjoy and do with practised ease and experience, I could not help wondering whether there is a place for his experience and expertise as a medical practitioner back home in Uganda. To be sure, a few richer clinics in African countries like South Africa, Egypt, and Libya may have some of these advanced medical systems.
However, the majority still rely on the ingenuity of doctors and nurses to pull off the equivalent of a miracle to keep premature babies and other patients alive. Where they lack in modern medical equipment, they make up in their resourcefulness and know-how born from using the bare necessities.
Could my brother’s skills, and those of thousands of other highly skilled daughters and sons of Africa working abroad, be utilised to augment healthcare delivery, better engineering, better agriculture, better education at minimal cost to the least developed nations in Africa?
Indeed, what would it take to create an online voluntary register, say for Rwandese or Congolese or Sudanese or Ugandans or Kenyans or any African national abroad that details the area of expertise and when the person is available to volunteer back home?
Would such an information centre allow, say, if electrical engineers were critically needed to set up a hydro-electric project in Chad or Central African Republic, for the host country to cull the names of potential volunteers abroad and invite them to give up a bit of their time to carry out the project?
Now, imagine that such a registry is expanded to include every willing soul including non-Africans with expertise to offer. Surely, the transfer of knowledge would trickle to those areas that sorely need it, not to mention the reverse flow of knowledge where resident experts teach those coming from abroad a thing or two. In this way, a poor country like Uganda which cannot afford to pay the huge hourly wage of a highly specialised paediatrician or engineer working in Toronto could, nonetheless, use the expertise at little or no cost.
What this means is that while a hospital in Mali, Senegal, Botswana, Malawi, Cote D’Ivoire or somewhere in the dusty corner of war-torn Somalia may not be able to afford a Giraffe Incubator to save premature babies, let alone drugs to cure the three-year-old baby suffering from malaria, it may still benefit from the free flow of ideas from developed nations and from developing countries with the potential to spark something innovatively beautiful, yet very simple to use.
It is a small idea with huge potential for supporting development in Africa.
Opiyo.oloya@sympatico.ca
Opiyo Oloya
OVER the Easter weekend, while visiting my brother Dr. Richard Oloya and his family in Canton in northeastern Ohio, USA, I got a chance to see the newly built Birth Center wing at the Aultman Hospital where he works as a senior neonatologist caring for premature babies. The centre offers the advanced Newborn Intensive Care Unit (NICU), delivering specialised care for premature and high-risk babies.
The last time I went through the hospital on a similar tour six or seven years ago, the preemies (as premature babies are known) were housed in one large brightly-lit room. Even then, the babies, some of them the size of my fist, were being cared for in fairly advanced incubators that allowed them to mature before being sent home with their relieved parents.
This time around, the NICU rooms are private, fitted with the $50,000 Giraffe OmniBed Incubator, a highly advanced state of the art technology with innovative design that provides perfectly controlled and monitored healing environment for intensively ill infants.
Inside the see-though Plexiglas cot with telescoping canopy, the baby is monitored around the clock by an array of computer monitors that check the lung capacity, heart-beat, weight, temperature, moisture, and how much nutrition is being absorbed into the body. Doctors can x-ray and operate on the infant right inside the Giraffe.
I trailed my brother on his round as another doctor and a nurse provided him the latest report on each baby.
When we reached a room where a nurse was busy with a very tiny infant, the report was not so good. The baby boy weighed a mere 800 grammes (1.7 pounds) when he was born, had briefly dropped about 200 grammes before stabilising at about a kilogramme or so. But, now, there were indications that he was gaining too much weight, and was also showing irregular heart beat, not to mention the sores he had developed on his backside as a result of the nurse cleaning the fragile skin. He needed to be monitored closely.
It is now possible to care for babies born at 23 weeks of pregnancy (around five months), my brother told me. “Of course, with these premature babies, it is all a balancing act—you cannot do too much of anything, feed them too much nutrition or force open their lungs with the ventilator because you will kill them,†he said. “As doctors, we work hard to keep them alive, but sometimes when all the indications are that the child has zero chance of quality life outside the hospital, the family chooses to unhook it from the machine to allow for quick exit.â€
Still, looking at my brother at his work, which he seemed to enjoy and do with practised ease and experience, I could not help wondering whether there is a place for his experience and expertise as a medical practitioner back home in Uganda. To be sure, a few richer clinics in African countries like South Africa, Egypt, and Libya may have some of these advanced medical systems.
However, the majority still rely on the ingenuity of doctors and nurses to pull off the equivalent of a miracle to keep premature babies and other patients alive. Where they lack in modern medical equipment, they make up in their resourcefulness and know-how born from using the bare necessities.
Could my brother’s skills, and those of thousands of other highly skilled daughters and sons of Africa working abroad, be utilised to augment healthcare delivery, better engineering, better agriculture, better education at minimal cost to the least developed nations in Africa?
Indeed, what would it take to create an online voluntary register, say for Rwandese or Congolese or Sudanese or Ugandans or Kenyans or any African national abroad that details the area of expertise and when the person is available to volunteer back home?
Would such an information centre allow, say, if electrical engineers were critically needed to set up a hydro-electric project in Chad or Central African Republic, for the host country to cull the names of potential volunteers abroad and invite them to give up a bit of their time to carry out the project?
Now, imagine that such a registry is expanded to include every willing soul including non-Africans with expertise to offer. Surely, the transfer of knowledge would trickle to those areas that sorely need it, not to mention the reverse flow of knowledge where resident experts teach those coming from abroad a thing or two. In this way, a poor country like Uganda which cannot afford to pay the huge hourly wage of a highly specialised paediatrician or engineer working in Toronto could, nonetheless, use the expertise at little or no cost.
What this means is that while a hospital in Mali, Senegal, Botswana, Malawi, Cote D’Ivoire or somewhere in the dusty corner of war-torn Somalia may not be able to afford a Giraffe Incubator to save premature babies, let alone drugs to cure the three-year-old baby suffering from malaria, it may still benefit from the free flow of ideas from developed nations and from developing countries with the potential to spark something innovatively beautiful, yet very simple to use.
It is a small idea with huge potential for supporting development in Africa.
Opiyo.oloya@sympatico.ca