Rwanda Human Resources for Health Program

The Rwanda Human Resources for Health Program was developed by the Rwandan Ministry of Health in partnership with US medical schools to support the development of critically needed clinical, teaching and research skills of current and future Rwandan faculty and specialist physicians who will be able to meet patient care needs at district, provincial and referral hospitals.

Rwanda currently faces a severe lack of adequate number of physicians and other health care workers, and one key root cause of this shortage is lack of adequate number of faculty to train future physicians. There are very few trained subspecialists, and residency training programs in Rwanda, begun in 2005, are still developing.

The Ministry of Health in Rwanda developed the Human Resources for Health (HRH) Program to collaborate with US schools of medicine including: Brown, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, University of Colorado, University of Maryland, University of Texas, University of Virginia and Yale. The primary goal is to support clinical faculty in Rwanda and strengthen targeted clinical residency programs, with an added impact on the quality of the clinical educations for interns and medical students. As part of this program, US schools will provide expatriate physician mentors in specialties and subspecialties in the following areas: Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, Obstetrics/Gynecology, Surgery, Anesthesiology, Family and Community Medicine, Oncology, Radiology, Pathology and Emergency Medicine.

For more on the program, in Chief Abundance Partner, Corrado Cancedda’s own words, see the video below.

Corrado Cancedda and Rwanda Human Resources for Health from Abundance Foundation on Vimeo.

The following video is the Rwanda Human Resources for Health Program announcement at the Clinton Global Initiative during the Closing Plenary session. [Relevant announcement starts at 15:37 – Chief Abundance Partner Corrado Cancedda and others are honored on stage]

Team

Corrado Cancedda

Corrado Cancedda, MD, PhD, graduated (with honors) in Medicine in 1996 from the University of Genoa, his hometown in Italy. From 1997 to 2001 he worked as a post-doctoral fellow in the Division of Immunogenetics at Columbia University in New York City. The results of Dr. Cancedda‚Äôs research on allograft rejection earned him a PhD in Clinical Immunology from the University of Genoa.

In 2002 Dr. Cancedda decided to pursue his clinical training in United States. From 2002 to 2005 he completed a residency in Internal Medicine at Jacobi Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine. In 2007 he completed his Infectious Diseases fellowship at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis.

Dr. Cancedda currently spends most of his time in Rwanda where he holds the position ‚ÄúPoorvu Family Faculty Fellow‚Äù for the country. In addition to direct patient care, he provides close clinical supervision and mentorship to rotating Global Health Equity (GHE) residents from Brigham & Women’s Hospital, as well as Rwandan physicians and nurses. His interest lies in the creation of high-quality and sustainable post-graduate training programs for health care providers in developing countries through the establishment of replicable partnership models between local and foreign academic institutions. Dr. Cancedda has been involved in the development of several post-graduate nursing training programs in Rwanda and is currently working on launching a Family and Community Medicine residency program for Rwandan medical graduates.