A global team of health experts known as Specialists Without Borders (SWB) are training Rwandan doctors and nurses on medical and surgical emergencies.

The training is also organized by the National University of Rwanda (NUR).

According to the acting Dean of the Faculty of Medicine in NUR, Charles Muhizi, the SWB experts have a mission to improve the health systems of developing countries by educating specialists in the most vital fields of medicine.

"In medicine there is always more to learn and as part of our 14th NUR medical seminar, we decided to invite these experts to equip our health workers with necessary skills in medical and surgical emergencies,” Muhizi said.

He also noted that next week, the team will move to Huye district where the university is based, to train the young doctors at the National University.

According to Dr. Paul Anderson, a surgeon and Director of SWB, the major topics that will be covered in the two day programme include compound tibial fractures emergency management, rapture of the uterus and assessment and acute treatment of patients with burns among others.

"We are specialists without borders and apparently here in Rwanda, we are doing a series of structured lectures and hopefully will improve those areas in which doctors may lack information about.

Basically these are like refresher courses,” Anderson said.

For the first time, breast health and breast cancer is set to be tackled during this seminar and according to officials, this will equip the health specialists here with appropriate skills to identify and treat this preventable killer of many women.

Participants actively got involved during the course of the presentations and by the end of the first session, acute sinusitis was highlighted as a complication that is responsible for a mortality rate of over 50 percent is not treated appropriately.

"This seminar is very timely as it tackles most of the health issues that we meet on a daily basis. We should have more experts coming to Rwanda for this purpose,” Dr. Elvis E. Tayebwa, a participant said.
Over 20 doctors and 5 nurses attended.

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