The Minister of Health, Dr. Austin Demby, on Thursday delivered the keynote address at a curricula development meeting organized by the College of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences (COMAHS). The gathering marked the first step towards the growth of dental education, public health, nursing and midwifery, undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in Sierra Leone.
Minister of Health, Dr. Austin Demby, delivered the keynote address at the curricula development meeting organized by the College of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences (COMAHS).
Under the leadership of Dr. Demby, medical education is a key cornerstone to advancing knowledge and fostering discoveries that will help shape the future of healthcare in Sierra Leone. For him, COMAHS is not just a cluster of buildings, but a hub for intellectual and scientific discoveries, where the future seeds of medical breakthroughs are nurtured.
Over the years, COMAHS has been providing undergraduate training programmes in medicine, pharmacy, medical laboratory sciences, nursing and midwifery, but is now expanding its undergraduate programmes to include dentistry and public health among other disciplines. With support from the Ministry of Health and the World Bank Group, the college has employed consultants to support the development of curricula in these course areas.
Minister of Health, Dr. Austin Demby, central, flanked by his Deputy Minister 1, Professor Charles Senessie, Dr. Mustapha Kabba, Deputy Chief Medical Officer and senior members of COMAHS on the high table.
The landmark curricula development engagement underscored both COMAHS and Ministry of Health’s (MoH) enduring commitment and dedication to not only expanding the medical landscape, but also ensuring excellence in training, research, innovation and, most importantly, patient care. The discussions are considered critical baseline for establishment of the right environment to produce top quality dentists, public health professionals, surgeons as well as nurses and midwives.
For Dr. Demby, the conversations are indicative of the health sector’s unwavering desire to nurture the next generation of health professionals. He said, “before now, COMAHS used to produce about 50 medical doctors and this was grossly inadequate to addressing the existing gap of patient to health worker ratio. Now, the Ministry of Health is working to improve this by tenfold.”
A cross section of participants at the curricula development meeting held at the New Brookfield’s Hotel in Freetown.
According to the Minister, achieving this requires the establishment of more modern training facilities as well as the requisite manpower to work in these structures across the country. Already, the Government of Sierra Leone, through MoH, recently opened the Julius Maada Bio Pediatric Center of Excellence, probably one of the best healthcare facilities for children in the Africa subregion, that provides specialized medical care.
The ministry has also completed the construction of a midwifery school equipped with state-of-the-art tools in Kenema with another medical school well underway at Njala University. All these gains are significant and worth celebrating, but actual transformation cannot be achieved without the requisite health workforce. That is why the Minister is deliberate about increasing the quantity and quality of the professional health service providers.