MASTER OF MEDICINE IN ANAESTHESIA

Objective

1. To train in teaching, research and anaesthesia healthcare delivery systems.
2. To produce Anaesthesiologists with requisite knowledge and skills for provision of holistic health care.
3. To generate, disseminate and preserve new knowledge and skills relevant to anaesthesia and critical care provision.
4. To conduct continuing education, instil requisite skills and discipline expected of ethical service driven graduates for provision of anaesthesia and critical care services.

Philosophy of the Programme

To train competent and relevant anaesthesiologists for local and international labour needs in keeping with prevailing trends of the time and adhering to the highest levels of professionalism, ethics and personal integrity for both students and staff.

Rationale of the Programme

Anaesthesia is an essential service in modern medical practice and health delivery systems all over the world. It is the most important scientific discovery in recent times and has revolutionized the practice of surgery and related subjects.

It was introduced in October 1846 in Massachusetts, in the United States of America.  Since then, it has undergone a lot of changes in development.  Nowadays, it is possible to get access to any part or cavity of the body safely while looking for disease, and come out safely.  It is almost impossible to imagine a good and safe surgical operation, without a good anaesthetic adjunct:  it is a distinct discipline on its own, with all that goes with it. In recent times, its safety and reliability has been enhanced by the introduction of electronic monitoring equipment. 

Anaesthesia is practiced hand-in-hand with critical care and pain relief services in most countries. Critical care medicine came into existence towards the end of the Second World War when it was realized that war victims with multiple organ failure may benefit from temporary technical support while giving time for their failed organs to recover well enough to resume their normal physiological functions. In this Country, both these services were in the past provided by non-physicians (clinical officers) and very few well trained Physician Anaesthetists.

The first critical care facility was started at the Infectious Diseases Hospital - IDH (now Mbagathi Hospital) for treatment of patients with bulbar poliomyelitis, using iron-lung ventilators.  It is this rudimentary unit which was moved to its present site at around 1972 (ICU-KNH).It was developed to what it is with the technical and personnel help from Japan.  It is now a fully functional unit with 21 beds.

The University has been aware of the need to train Physicians in postgraduate anaesthesia to man these services competently.  For this reason, a postgraduate course for the Degree of Master of Medicine in Anaesthesia was started in 1978.  This course trains registered postgraduate students in all aspects of a safe practice of Anaesthesia at par with similar courses in other medical specialties such as paediatrics, internal medicine and surgery. It has developed well since inception with the number of students who have successfully graduated standing at about 220. Some have been lost through attrition and immigration as foreign students have also been trained here leaving only 147 registered Physician Anaesthetists by the Kenya Society of Anaesthesiologists. Going by the Kenyan population of about 47.5 million, there is one Physician Anaesthetist catering for about 324,000 people. Currently there is no World Health Organization recommendation on the distribution of Physician Anaesthetists, although the government of Italy recommends 1:130,000.

A great majority of these Physicians are concentrated in the big cities like Nairobi and Mombasa. The National Health Sector Strategic Plan 2005-2010 (Ministry of Health) recommends 3 Physician Anaesthetists in each Level 5 hospital. Currently there is only one and in some hospitals none and for that reason, there is an acute shortage of physician anesthetists particularly in the provinces and districts.