BME student Allison Keane fixing medical equipment
Published November 13, 2009, last updated on March 5, 2013 under Education News
The GE Foundation has announced that it will fund the training of a biomedical engineering technician for every hospital in Rwanda. The basis for the training will be a new curriculum developed by undergraduates at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering.
Duke biomedical engineering students Allison Keane, Jenna Maloka, Kathleen Murphy and Marian Dickinson were among a team of researchers who developed the curriculum for secondary school graduates. They analyzed reports from several thousand pieces of broken medical equipment to determine why it fails when it arrives in the developing world. They then developed a curriculum based on the knowledge required to return the equipment to service in a resource-poor setting. Some students conducted this research while spending a summer in Africa with the Duke-Engineering World Health Summer Institute.
Although Rwanda has been experiencing a remarkable recovery from a devastating civil war, the nation still suffers from a severe lack of trained personnel in the health care professions. There simply aren’t enough doctors, nurses or biomedical engineers to keep the health care system operating. In fact, there is no school to train biomedical engineers or biomedical engineering technicians in the country.
The curriculum created by Pratt’s undergraduates teaches skills specific to a resource-poor hospital. It may, for example, educate health care providers how to substitute a broken fuse from the marketplace in an electrocardiogram when the exact replacement fuse is not available. The goal is to teach the new curriculum in Rwanda for several years, as Pratt develops a longer curriculum that new Rwandan graduates would be able to use to continue instruction.
“We’re very excited about this roll-out,” said Robert Malkin, DGHI member and director of Duke-Engineering World Health. “We’ve also discussed rolling out this curriculum in Ethiopia and Mozambique with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
The World Health Organization estimates most of the medical equipment in the developing world is not working. Broken equipment causes millions of people to go without treatment every year. The work of these Pratt students goes a long way toward making health care available to all residents of a low-income country.
The curriculum created by Pratt’s undergraduates teaches skills specific to a resource-poor hospital. It may, for example, educate health care providers how to substitute a broken fuse from the marketplace in an electrocardiogram when the exact replacement fuse is not available.
