good news for tanzania
UCSF wins $7.5M grant to address health worker shortage in Tanzania
San Francisco Business Times
The University of California, San Francisco said Tuesday it has won a $7.5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help address the shortage of health-care workers in Tanzania, in East Africa.
The two-year grant will support collaboration between UCSF Global Health Sciences and Tanzania’s Muhimbili University of Health Allied Sciences, that nation’s only public university of health sciences, to develop and implement strategies for Dar es Salaam-based Muhimbili and other African institutions to meet their countries’ health workforce needs.
UCSF Professor Sarah Macfarlane, director of program planning and development at UCSF Global Health Sciences, and MUHAS Professor Ephata Kaaya will lead the collaboration, which is expected to set the stage for similar partnerships elsewhere in Africa.
Solving sub-Saharan Africa’s health-care worker shortage has long been a priority for governments, universities and international organizations, according to the two universities, who say Tanzania’s leaders recognize the need to educate and train more health-care workers. The partnership aims to develop an “institutional partnership model” that can be replicated in other low-resource settings.
UCSF said faculty from its schools of medicine, nursing, pharmacy and dentistry will work with their MUHAS counterparts, as well as the MUHAS School of Public Health, to share curricula and educational technologies and to develop collaborative research programs.
Haile Debas, M.D., executive director of UCSF Global Health Sciences, noted in the Jan. 6 statement that UCSF and Muhimbili are both public health sciences institutions that train physicians, nurses, pharmacists, dentists and allied health workers, and that they’ve worked together for four years, achieving “a high level of professional trust and respect.”
In early December, UCSF announced a $4 million grant from the Gates Foundation to support planning for a potential systemwide UC School of Global Health. The proposed school, which the university envisions as training new leaders to help tackle global health issues, would be UC’s first multicampus, systemwide school, the university said.
Efforts to launch the new UC global health school are being led, at least initially, by experts at UCSF, including former UCSF Medical School Dean and former campus chancellor Debas, and Sir Richard Feachem, a professor of global health at UCSF and UC Berkeley.
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