It all started as an undergraduate medical student.
I am an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine and Critical Care at Addis Ababa University, College of Health Sciences. As an Emergency Medicine physician, I am committed not only to develop my clinical skills in the Emergency Department but also to improving my skills in clinical research, which all started as a final year medical student during my undergraduate studies.
Emergency Medicine (EM) is a completely new specialty in Ethiopia by the time when I have started to pursue my specialty training, with not much research base exists to support our practice. Clinical research done elsewhere is rarely relevant here and many of the research questions asked elsewhere do not apply in our setting. As the practice of EM develops in Ethiopia, research to support that practice must develop also. I wanted to become an expert in the field of clinical research, so I can lead that development.
While I was having my three poster presentations at the International Conference on Emergency Medicine (ICEM 2016) in Cape Town South Africa and also participating in a two-day pre-conference workshop in Research Methodology, I heard news of my acceptance for a one year Harvard Medical School Global Clinical Scholars Research Training Program 2016/17.
This was after my own web-based search and application for clinical research training in addition to my residency training.
Global Clinical Scholars Research Training Program (GCSRTP) offered by Harvard University Medical School Office of Global Education is highly competitive clinical research training for clinical research scientists from all over the country. I am one of 113 advanced trainees from around the world selected for their ability and interest in pursuing clinical or epidemiological research. Students are drawn from hospitals, clinics, and academic communities globally and bring the unique perspective of their home country and institution to address research issues in a clinical or population-based setting.
This is a year-long intensive program is designed for clinicians and clinician-scientists aimed to achieve three goals:
- To build skills in clinical research,
- To provide knowledge to address issues critical for success in contemporary clinical research, and
- To develop a global network.
The GCSRTP consists of three on-site workshops (two in London, UK, and one in Boston) as well as 85 online lectures, 5 team assignments, 20 quizzes covering lecture content, a midterm and a final exam, as well as 2 or 3 interactive webinars per month in biostatistics, epidemiology, biostatistical computing, ethics and regulatory approaches, leadership, applied regression, longitudinal analysis and correlated outcomes, survey design, causal diagrams, and advanced quantitative methods. Additionally, I have selected an elective and a concentration and completed my own course work related to those tracks. The program requires an original research proposal as a Capstone Project. Graduation from the program relies on successful completion of this project. And thus, I had successfully completed my capstone project titled Diuretics Options in Acute Coronary Syndrome as a requirement for my successful graduation.
Through the Harvard Medical School Tuition Reduction Program, I was able to negotiate a 50% reduction in the usual tuition of $11,900 for the program. Additional expenses for travel and accommodation and supplies were my responsibility.
How all of the above came into fruition as a start base from my undergraduate study in Medicine?
There was a medical student mentorship research program of the Medical Education Partnership Initiative as a part of the NIH funded grant in 2013. For the same, I have assessed an undergraduate medical student’s clerkship rotation in Emergency Medicine as an Ethiopian experience. This paper, which was also published in the African Journal of Emergency Medicine, was a gateway for all of my clinical research experiences to date. There is a blog post about my clinical research experience in the same journal as well as I was a speaker on the most recent African Conference on Emergency Medicine in Kigali Rwanda, 2018.
My subsequent future as a clinical researcher:
I completed my residency in January 2018. With the skills developed in the GCSRT and my clinical qualification, I was well-positioned to apply for further clinical research fellowship at Addis Ababa University and got accepted for a Junior Faculty Research Fellowship under an NIH funded grant of Medical Education Partnership Initiative 2019-2020. I hope to begin developing research projects, possibly multi-site within Ethiopia that will address the many questions that are relevant to Emergency Medicine as it is practiced in our low-resource setting.
