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PRIMAFAMED: Improving Health Care in Africa

African countries face daunting challenges to increase access to primary health care and improve its quality. This is largely due to the lack of adequately educated and community oriented general practitioners. The PRIMAFAMED project aims to help African universities face these challenges by upgrading the quality of structures, curricula and educational methods for training of family physicians at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

To this end, the Primary Health Care/ Family Medicine Education Network (PRIMAFAMED) focuses on developing departments that teach family medicine. It also enhances academic relevance and research, with the ultimate goal of improving the quality of teaching. 

PRIMAFAMED partners will establish a network for collaboration between universities in the Africa, where family medicine departments and units in African universities can learn from each other; South-South cooperation. The consortium will include departments of family medicine and primary health care of 10 African universities, which will be coordinated and supported by the Department of Family Medicine and Primary Health Care of Ghent University in Belgium. The South-African primary health care system is a good example and useful for support. The 8 South-African university departments of family medicine are involved in in the network.

Developing structures for teaching family medicine

Firstly, PRIMAFAMED partners will pool their knowledge to establish new and strengthen existing academic departments that offer family medicine training in participating African universities.

A coordinator at the family medicine and primary health care department of Ghent University is working on the project. In each partner university a local coordinator will be appointed and there will be active exchange of existing models related to management and the structural organisation of the primary care units. The purpose of this activity is to improve the institutional framework of African universities to improve integrating family medicine teaching elements. 

Training African doctors

These departments will provide the institutional base that will allow the realisation of family medicine training programmes in the following phase of PRIMAFAMED. In order to better meet the human resources needs in the health care system in Africa, health care workers need to be trained in a sustainable and locally-appropriate way. This is why, following a thorough needs assessment in the field of family medicine in the African countries, the experienced partners and associates will support the African partners to develop and upgrade family medicine teaching curricula and tools.

Also, enhanced accreditation and quality assurance will be sought, and funding will be provided for staff exchanges and research. During this process, Master’s level courses in family and community medicine will be developed and suitable candidates for PhD studies will be identified.

The project will take existing curricula as a starting point, enhancing them with materials and tools available. A bottom-up approach will be applied, meaning that whenever a partner or an associate develops a tool, it makes it available to others in the network.

European input will be significant. For instance, The Global Health through Education Training and Service (GHETS) and the Network Towards Unity for Health (the Network/ TUFH) will help with their expertise and knowledge about the health care situation in Africa. The expertise of the Flemish Interuniversity Training Programme in Family Medicine (ICHO) will be included. The International Centre of Reproductive Health (ICRH) at Ghent University will be responsible for the development of a module on sexual and reproductive health, gender issues and violence.

Expanding access to high quality health care throughout Africa

The Partners of PRIMAFAMED are confident that their project will have a major impact on improving accessibility of health care, and will lead to more equitable and locally-relevant primary health care systems.

The major achievement of PRIMAFAMED will be the creation of a consortium of strengthened family medicine departments with a shared flexible, relevant core curriculum and a solid means of communication. This will greatly contribute to creating an effective primary care workforce in Africa with appropriate skills and attitudes to serve local populations.

The project will result in a greater number of trained physicians to provide high quality health care orientated towards the needs of individuals, their families and the communities, especially for the most vulnerable and underserved in the Frica. In addition to focusing on marginalised communities, the project will address issues of equity at all levels including gender, social class and race.

Equally importantly, PRIMAFAMED will develop a comprehensive analysis, vision and strategy pertaining to the contribution made by health professionals, family medicine and the primary care team in the specific context of resource-poor settings in Africa. The goal is to then use these results to engage decision makers, health authorities and communities to implement such strategies in a sustainable manner throughout Africa.

Funding

PRIMAFAMED is funded for a 2-year period by the European Union via EDULINK.