Challenges and innovations brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic regarding medical and pharmacy education especially in Africa and implications for the future

Background: Multiple measures introduced early to restrict COVID-19 have dramatically impacted the teaching of medical and pharmacy students, exacerbated by the lack of infrastructure and experience with e-learning at the start of the pandemic. In addition, the costs and reliability of the Internet across Africa pose challenges alongside undertaking clinical teaching and practical programmes. Consequently, there is a need to understand the many challenges and how these were addressed, given increasingly complex patients, to provide future direction. Method: An exploratory study was conducted among senior-level medical and pharmacy educators across Africa, addressing four key questions, including the challenges resulting from the pandemic and how these were dealt with. Results: Staff and student members faced multiple challenges initially, including adapting to online learning. In addition, concerns with the lack of equipment (especially among disadvantaged students), the costs of Internet bundles, and how to conduct practicals and clinical teaching. Multiple activities were undertaken to address these challenges. These included training sessions, developing innovative approaches to teaching, and seeking ways to reduce Internet costs. Robust approaches to practicals, clinical teaching, and assessments have been developed. Conclusions: Appreciable difficulties to teaching arising from the pandemic are being addressed across Africa. Research is ongoing to improve education and assessments

THE RELATIONSHIP between COURSE MANAGEMENT and EXAMINATION ATTRITION RATES among UNDERGRADUATE MEDICAL STUDENTS at the UNIVERSITY OF ZAMBIA

This study investigated the relationship between course management and examination attrition rates among undergraduate medical students at the University of Zambia, School of Medicine between the years 2008 to 2016. An explanatory sequential research design was used for data collection. Data were captured using an evaluation survey instrument, students’ Focus Group Discussion schedule and an interview schedule for key informants. Quantitative data from the first set were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics while qualitative data from the second set were analysed using constant comparative method. The findings indicate that there was significant statistical difference in the course workloads in all programmes (p = 0.000, F = 4, 596, d f = 8.53). The course loads were heavy, had little time allocated to them. Course concepts were not taught in depth and led to students’ perceptions that the courses were difficult. As such, there is urgent need to revise or review course contents (i. e. curricular) of several programmes to be in accordance with the time allocated to them and that the Department of Medical Education and Development (DMED) should consider organizing specific pedagogical training programmes for existing and newly employed academic staff

Medical education departments: a study of four medical schools in Sub-Saharan Africa

CITATION: Kiguli-Malwadde, E. et al. 2015. Medical education departments : a study of four medical schools in Sub-Saharan Africa. BMC Medical Education, 15:109, doi:10.1186/s12909-015-0398-y.The original publication is available at http://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.comBackground: Many African countries are investing in medical education to address significant health care workforce shortages and ultimately improve health care. Increasingly, training institutions are establishing medical education departments as part of this investment. This article describes the status of four such departments at sub-Saharan African medical schools supported by the Medical Education Partnership Initiative (MEPI). This article will provide information about the role of these institutional structures in fostering the development of medical education within the African context and highlight factors that enable or constrain their establishment and sustainability. Methods: In-depth interviews were conducted with the heads or directors of the four medical education departments using a structured interview protocol developed by the study group. An inductive approach to analysis of the interview transcripts was adopted as the texts were subjected to thematic content analysis. Results: Medical education departments, also known as units or centers, were established for a range of reasons including: to support curriculum review, to provide faculty development in Health Professions Education, and to improve scholarship in learning and teaching. The reporting structures of these departments differ in terms of composition and staff numbers. Though the functions of departments do vary, all focus on improving the quality of health professions education. External and internal funding, where available, as well as educational innovations were key enablers for these departments. Challenges included establishing and maintaining the legitimacy of the department, staffing the departments with qualified individuals, and navigating dependence on external funding. All departments seek to expand the scope of their services by offering higher degrees in HPE, providing assistance to other universities in this domain, and developing and maintaining a medical education research agenda. Conclusions: The establishment of medical education departments in Sub-Saharan Africa is a strategy medical schools can employ to improve the quality of health professions education. The creation of communities of practice such as has been done by the MEPI project is a good way to expand the network of medical education departments in the region enabling the sharing of lessons learned across the continent.http://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12909-015-0398-yPublisher's versio

The soft things of life: detection and manhood in South-Eastern Africa

This article seeks to address the invisibility of Zambian literature in African literary studies and, more broadly, of much locally-published African writing in international literary Postcolonialism. It also hopes to contribute to the construction of an argument in favour of postcolonialising and localising the notion of genre, by asking questions about a group of locally-circulating narratives concerned with reproducing patriarchal masculinities. I scrutinise two detective stories by Henry Mtonga, a member of the Zambian police criminal investigations department and a contributor to the literary movement around the journal New Writing from Zambia during its “golden period” in the early 1970s. The stories (“Soft Things of Life”, 1970, and “Hot Matter”, 1971) detail the exploits of private detective Ozi (Lusaka’s “famous crime buster”) and his partner Zombe. The article reads them: as textual symptoms of repressed desire, as allegories of a patriarchal Christian nation, and (most significantly), as successive episodes of a potentially endless chain, as key nodes in a regional continuum of fictional forms that spans adventure-based narratives of male sexual maturing such as Gideon Phiri’s Ticklish Sensation (Lusaka 1973), Bill Fairbairn’s Run for Freedom (Lusaka 1984), Shimmer Chinodya ‘s Farai’s Girls (Harare 1987) and Omondi Mak’oloo’s Times Beyond (Nairobi 1991