Tanzania inahitaji wataalam wa kila aina katika sekta ya afya, hasa wapasuaji. Dr. Godwin Godfrey (32) anasomea upasuaji wa moyo wa watoto (Peadiatric Cardiac Surgeon) nchini Israel. Akirudi Tanzania, atakuwa mtaalam peke yake. Inadaiwa watoto zaidi ya nusu milioni wana subiri huduma yake.
Nauliza, hivi mtaalam kama huyo atalipwa mshahara anaostahili? Je, ataishia kuwa 'frustrated' na kukimilia nchi nyingine ambayo watamheshimu?
Mungu ambariki, na tuombe aweze kurudi Tanzania kuhudumia watoto wetu.
Asante Da Subi kwa kunistua kuhusu habari hii:
Asante Da Subi kwa kunistua kuhusu habari hii:
****************************************************
Dr. Godwin Godfrey
Article cross-posted from NationalPost.com, written by Peter Goodspeed
Friday, Apr. 27, 2012
It’s the numbers that fascinate Dr. Godwin Godfrey, a 32-year-old Tanzanian who is finishing a five-year training course in Israel to become a pediatric cardiac surgeon.
When he graduates next summer, he will become the first and only pediatric heart surgeon in all of Tanzania – a country of 43 million people.
Tanzania’s Ministry of Health already has a waiting list of nearly 500,000 patients who desperately need his services.
The government, which sends most of its patients who need heart surgery overseas to countries like India, can only afford to care for about 100 people a year.
“You can see the chances of making it are slim,” says the surgeon. “A child on the waiting list with a serious heart condition may wait maybe three or four years and die of complications like heart failure.
“Sometimes it can be very depressing being a doctor in a poor country like Tanzania,” he says. “Too many times you see children dying in front of your eyes. You know that you are supposed to do something, like give them medicine, but you don’t have it.”
When he first started his training as a pediatric surgeon in Israel’s Wolfson Medical Centre under a program sponsored by the Save A Child’s Heart charity, Dr. Godfrey said he experienced something akin to “culture shock.”
“I always used to see a lot of death,” he says. “In our department in Tanzania [in the Bugando Medical Center in the city of Mwanza — an 850-bed hospital that serves 15 million people] you could have five or seven children die every day. When I got to Israel to train I realized we weren’t seeing any children die — even in a month.
“This was really an eye-opener. Whatever we were doing; it was wrong,” he says. “It opened my eyes. There is so much that we don’t know. There is so much equipment that we don’t have. There is so much medication that we don’t have.”
‘I always used to see a lot of death’
The son of a surgeon, Dr. Godfrey, who was born in a small town on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, has been familiar most of his life with the difficulties of practicing medicine in a developing country.
After graduating at the top of his class in high school in Tanzania, he won a scholarship to study medicine at Makerere University in neighbouring Uganda. When he returned home to serve his internship, he deliberately selected the Bugando Medical Centre in Mwanza, Tanzania.
“Most of our doctors are actually located in Dar es Salaam, the capital,” he says. “That’s the biggest city and all the government offices are there. But with me being interested in surgery, I thought if I went to work in one of the big hospitals I wouldn’t get the hands-on experience that I wanted.”
In Mwanza, he was overwhelmed with work and because of a shortage of surgeons and specialists found himself doing everything from pediatric cases to orthopedic, ophthalmology and neuro-surgery.
When he started a residency in the Mwanza hospital, he shifted to cardiac surgery, but found himself stymied by a lack of equipment and expertise.
‘Being in Africa, in this hospital, we didn’t have the equipment to conduct open-heart surgery’
“Being in Africa, in this hospital, we didn’t have the equipment to conduct open-heart surgery,” he says. “So we have had to start building our unit from scratch.”
When Dr. Godfrey investigated the possibility of getting some expert training in cardiac surgery, he discovered the only place he could do so in Africa was in South Africa, Egypt, Morocco or Tunisia. But when he tried to apply, he was told those countries weren’t interested in training foreign doctors.
Then in 2006 a visiting German doctor, working for a Christian charity, suggested Dr. Godfrey should apply to study in Israel under a humanitarian project sponsored by the Save A Child’s Heart organization.
Over the last 15 years, cardiac surgeons operating out of the Wolfson Medical Centre in Holon, Israel, have treated more than 2,800 children with congenital heart diseases and adolescents with heart valve diseases.
Patients are now flown into Israel from all over the world for about 225 emergency operations each year, with 43% of the cases coming from Africa and 47% from neighbouring Arab states.
Save a Child’s Heart offered Dr. Godfrey a full five-year scholarship to study pediatric cardiac surgery and has methodically begun to help him train a complete surgery team to work with him in Tanzania.
“Heart surgery is teamwork,” says Dr. Godfrey, who was in Toronto this week to tour Sick Children’s Hospital. “It’s not just the work of a surgeon. You need a cardiologist, an anesthesiologist, an intensive care unit internist, people to operate the heart pumps and ventilators.”
‘We had to stop her heart, go in and close this hole and then start the heart functioning again’
Last summer, a team of 13 doctors from Save a Child’s Heart travelled to Tanzania to stage a cardiac clinic in Dr. Godfrey’s hospital and operated on 13 seriously ill children, including the first ever open-heart operation on a child in Tanzania.
Four year-old Laurencia Simon, the daughter of farmers who live in a mud hut without electricity or running water three hours drive from Mwanza, underwent the historic surgery.
“She had a hole in her heart,” Dr. Godfrey explains. “We had to stop her heart, go in and close this hole and then start the heart functioning again.”
“In places like Canada, you can do this operation any day,” he says “You don’t let patients with the condition become six months old or even a year, without the operation. But in Tanzania, this little girl was four years old and she could have died while being on a waiting list.”
Now, she is healthy and back in school.
In a very small way, things are about to change in Tanzania.
• Email: pgoodspeed@nationalpost.com
Friday, Apr. 27, 2012
It’s the numbers that fascinate Dr. Godwin Godfrey, a 32-year-old Tanzanian who is finishing a five-year training course in Israel to become a pediatric cardiac surgeon.
When he graduates next summer, he will become the first and only pediatric heart surgeon in all of Tanzania – a country of 43 million people.
Tanzania’s Ministry of Health already has a waiting list of nearly 500,000 patients who desperately need his services.
The government, which sends most of its patients who need heart surgery overseas to countries like India, can only afford to care for about 100 people a year.
“You can see the chances of making it are slim,” says the surgeon. “A child on the waiting list with a serious heart condition may wait maybe three or four years and die of complications like heart failure.
“Sometimes it can be very depressing being a doctor in a poor country like Tanzania,” he says. “Too many times you see children dying in front of your eyes. You know that you are supposed to do something, like give them medicine, but you don’t have it.”
When he first started his training as a pediatric surgeon in Israel’s Wolfson Medical Centre under a program sponsored by the Save A Child’s Heart charity, Dr. Godfrey said he experienced something akin to “culture shock.”
“I always used to see a lot of death,” he says. “In our department in Tanzania [in the Bugando Medical Center in the city of Mwanza — an 850-bed hospital that serves 15 million people] you could have five or seven children die every day. When I got to Israel to train I realized we weren’t seeing any children die — even in a month.
“This was really an eye-opener. Whatever we were doing; it was wrong,” he says. “It opened my eyes. There is so much that we don’t know. There is so much equipment that we don’t have. There is so much medication that we don’t have.”
‘I always used to see a lot of death’
The son of a surgeon, Dr. Godfrey, who was born in a small town on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, has been familiar most of his life with the difficulties of practicing medicine in a developing country.
After graduating at the top of his class in high school in Tanzania, he won a scholarship to study medicine at Makerere University in neighbouring Uganda. When he returned home to serve his internship, he deliberately selected the Bugando Medical Centre in Mwanza, Tanzania.
“Most of our doctors are actually located in Dar es Salaam, the capital,” he says. “That’s the biggest city and all the government offices are there. But with me being interested in surgery, I thought if I went to work in one of the big hospitals I wouldn’t get the hands-on experience that I wanted.”
In Mwanza, he was overwhelmed with work and because of a shortage of surgeons and specialists found himself doing everything from pediatric cases to orthopedic, ophthalmology and neuro-surgery.
When he started a residency in the Mwanza hospital, he shifted to cardiac surgery, but found himself stymied by a lack of equipment and expertise.
‘Being in Africa, in this hospital, we didn’t have the equipment to conduct open-heart surgery’
“Being in Africa, in this hospital, we didn’t have the equipment to conduct open-heart surgery,” he says. “So we have had to start building our unit from scratch.”
When Dr. Godfrey investigated the possibility of getting some expert training in cardiac surgery, he discovered the only place he could do so in Africa was in South Africa, Egypt, Morocco or Tunisia. But when he tried to apply, he was told those countries weren’t interested in training foreign doctors.
Then in 2006 a visiting German doctor, working for a Christian charity, suggested Dr. Godfrey should apply to study in Israel under a humanitarian project sponsored by the Save A Child’s Heart organization.
Over the last 15 years, cardiac surgeons operating out of the Wolfson Medical Centre in Holon, Israel, have treated more than 2,800 children with congenital heart diseases and adolescents with heart valve diseases.
Patients are now flown into Israel from all over the world for about 225 emergency operations each year, with 43% of the cases coming from Africa and 47% from neighbouring Arab states.
Save a Child’s Heart offered Dr. Godfrey a full five-year scholarship to study pediatric cardiac surgery and has methodically begun to help him train a complete surgery team to work with him in Tanzania.
“Heart surgery is teamwork,” says Dr. Godfrey, who was in Toronto this week to tour Sick Children’s Hospital. “It’s not just the work of a surgeon. You need a cardiologist, an anesthesiologist, an intensive care unit internist, people to operate the heart pumps and ventilators.”
‘We had to stop her heart, go in and close this hole and then start the heart functioning again’
Last summer, a team of 13 doctors from Save a Child’s Heart travelled to Tanzania to stage a cardiac clinic in Dr. Godfrey’s hospital and operated on 13 seriously ill children, including the first ever open-heart operation on a child in Tanzania.
Four year-old Laurencia Simon, the daughter of farmers who live in a mud hut without electricity or running water three hours drive from Mwanza, underwent the historic surgery.
“She had a hole in her heart,” Dr. Godfrey explains. “We had to stop her heart, go in and close this hole and then start the heart functioning again.”
“In places like Canada, you can do this operation any day,” he says “You don’t let patients with the condition become six months old or even a year, without the operation. But in Tanzania, this little girl was four years old and she could have died while being on a waiting list.”
Now, she is healthy and back in school.
In a very small way, things are about to change in Tanzania.
• Email: pgoodspeed@nationalpost.com
Source: http://www.wavuti.com/4/post/2012/04/nearly-500000-children-waiting-for-tanzanias-only-surgeon-dr-g-godfrey.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wavuti+%28Wavuti+%29#ixzz1tKF774au
Tunahitaji mtu kama huyo Tanzania asaidie watoto wetu. Aje haraka sana.
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