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Anesthesia was one of the least developed disciplines in the history of medical practice in Ethiopia. Due primarily to that, foreign anesthetists coming from different countries of the world exclusively covered the anesthesia service in the country for quite a very long time. Now, Anesthesia has reached a stage in which it has become one of the most important disciplines in the health delivery system of the country. The history of the effort to provide education and training in anesthesia goes back to 1974 G.C. In that year, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Ministry of Health agreed to open a school of Anesthesia for Nurses at Black lion Hospital This school, as the first of its kind in the country helped the growth and development of the area by way of training a total number of 226 nurse anesthetists at the advanced diploma level and 62 students at the Bachelor of Science level. There are around 1000 Bsc graduate, 30 Anestheologist, 70 MSc and 211 Anesthesia level 5 graduates serving the nations. Due to critical shortage of anesthesia professionals FMOH of Ethiopia in collaboration with Ministry of Education (TVET) program developed curriculum for Level V anesthesia and started short term training since April, 2012.
Goal and Objectives
- The goal of Anesthesia is to scale up universities from 6 to 9 universities.
- Enroll 15 trainees per 12 HSc per year and build the capacity of the institution.
- Increase institutional intake at universities and HSC.
Implementation Strategy
The implementation strategies of Anesthesia imitative according to the short term plain developed curriculum and enroll minimum 15 unemployed nurses per 12 HSC per year from 2012.
Build the capacity of 5 universities to increase the intake of generic BSc students
Achievements
The major accomplishment of the initiative:
- By 2014 eight universities and 13 health science colleges and practical hospitals capacity was built with educational materials like LCD, printer and photocopy machines skill lab equipments (airway and spinal trainer simulation) books and anesthesia machines.
- Health science colleges were supported with tuition fees starting from April,2012
- Induction training given to BSc and anesthesia Level 5 graduates.
- Effective teaching skill given to the tutors before deployment.
- Technical update training given in 2 rounds for tutors and preceptors per year.
- Performance assessment done to 88 Anesthesia Level 5 graduate June, 2014 .
Major challenges of the initiatives
- Critical shortage of anesthesia professionals due to lack of motivation and retention mechanism.
- Changing their profession to other discipline due to many reasons like professional hazards this has an impact on the service.
- The infrastructure of training universities limits to enroll large numbers of trainees.
- Salary and carriers of anesthesia Level 5 limits the enrollments to health science colleges.
- Technical update trainings are not organized to the service providers.
- Some of the primary hospitals infrastructure where not finished and it was a challenge to deploy graduate and has an impact on the service.
Future plan
- Provide educational materials to training institution.
- To scale up the number of universities and health science college.
- Deploy anesthesia professional to health institution as per the standard
- Ensure service quality and provision per standard
- Technical update training to be given as per the assessed knowledge, skill and attitude gap