The Toronto Addis Ababa Psychiatry Project (TAAPP) and the Toronto Addis Ababa Academic Collaboration (TAAAC) will celebrate their 10 and five year anniversaries on November 8th. The partnerships between the University of Toronto and Addis Ababa University (AAU) are forging Ethiopia’s capacity for medical and non-medical specialty training programs
TAAPP was established in 2003 through the leadership of Professor Clare Pain, and two Ethiopian psychiatry professors, Dr. Atalay Alem and Dr. Mesfin Araya (both of whom now also hold U of T appointments). Their goal was to build and sustain Ethiopia’s first residency program in psychiatry. It has been training psychiatrists, who AAU could later hire as faculty, allowing the University to sustain this new specialty program.
At the time, Ethiopia had been experiencing a significant “brain drain,” and according to Dr. Brian Hodges, Chair of the Transitional Governance Committee of TAAAC, for every eight doctors trained in Ethiopia, just one stayed.
Since then, TAAPP has had a profound effect on that country’s mental health landscape. The program has a 95 per cent graduate retention rate and has qualified more than 40 psychiatrists to practice in Ethiopia. This has propelled the number of psychiatrists in that country from 11 to more than 50.
As the number of graduates has grown, so has the number of medical schools with psychiatry departments, multiplying the educational model. There are now eight different medical schools that offer psychiatry in the curricula.
“They don’t need us to do the frontline teaching anymore, which is wonderful. We have gradually shifted our work. The first shift was to help them build a departmental structure, so they would have a full service academic department, and allow us to work with our Ethiopian colleagues on new things like research, faculty development, educational development, fellowship training, more advanced things,” Hodges said, who is also a Professor in U of T’s Department of Psychiatry as well as Vice President of Education at the University Health Network.
As a result of TAAPP’s success, another broader initiative, TAAAC, was introduced in 2008 to help strengthen AAU’s capacity for other health professions such as pharmacy, rehabilitation, and nursing, as well as non-health related programs including library science and engineering.
“What I hope we will see is that each of them, on their own timeline, is building in the same direction,” he said.
It’s a development that can already be seen in some programs.
As an example, the emergency residency training program graduated its first class in October – Ethiopia’s first group of emergency medicine specialists. As was the case in psychiatry, the number of specialists in this field is predicted to balloon as future students complete the program.
The effect is being repeated by all of the programs within TAAAC.
AAU isn’t alone in benefitting from the collaboration. Hodges pointed out participants from U of T are also gaining unique and valuable exposure to global health.
“It’s not that our students don’t travel; they do. And it’s not that we haven’t had overseas programs for years; we have. But we haven’t had programs with this intense, two-to-one type mentorship, and now this exists in many of our collaborations in TAAAC. So it’s also building capacity for us.”
The anniversaries of TAAPP and TAAAC will be celebrated with a full-day global health symposium at Hart House on Friday, November 8 from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Admission is free. For more information, click here.
A gala reception and dinner is also planned that evening. Tickets are sold out.
