Care onderzoekers in de landelijke pers - Nphf

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bulletin van de netherlands school of primary care research
◄ terUg Naar INHOUD
40
carré | jaargang 15 | nr 51 | maart 2010
Ethiopian government sent three delegations of
their own medical experts to about a dozen PBL
based medical schools in different parts of the
world. now a general consensus is emerging that
medical education in Ethiopia has to become more
student centered and that PBL may be an interesting
approach especially for training students who
already have a background in related sciences such
as for example biology or nursing. It was decided
that all curricula need to be “modularized”. Since
all medical faculties and also the ministries are still
grappling with what modularization exactly means
for the education of medical students and how to
go about it, we are currently considering a national
workshop for all medical faculties in Ethiopia
in order to take this line of thinking a couple of
steps forward.
Community based research
One other important component of the project
was to facilitate staff members to conduct
research. Choosing this intervention was based on
the following considerations:
an essential feature of a good quality graduate
program is a strong research program, run by creative
and passionate staff that can inspire students.
Research can generate knowledge that will even-
tually contribute to improvement of the health
situation in Ethiopia
Research is an important incentive for staff to stay
with the institute. this is important since staff
turnover is extremely high at the medical faculties.
two researchers from maastricht University
trained their Ethiopian counter parts on how
to start and conduct research. Subsequently 30
research proposals were written by the Ethiopians.
the 20 best proposals were selected by the
research committees and based on feedback by the
mU researchers. these proposals were supported
with project funding. this project component generated
a lot of enthusiasm and the quality of the
research projects ranged from modest to high, and
in some cases very high. there are plenty of opportunities
to enhance the capacity even more. the
research topics have been developed on an ad-hoc
basis without a clear agenda. there is little or no
relation between the various studies being conducted.
We are looking for ways to make the research
efforts more coherent and sustainable. this will
be subject of discussion at a seminar at which the
most outstanding community based research projects
will be presented to the public and representatives
of the donor community. the objective is to
mobilise funds for follow up research which will
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