Design, Evaluation and Implementation of a Novel BME Instrumentation course at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda

Abstract

Uganda is increasingly dependent upon imported biomedical pieces of equipment to support patient care and health related research. Most of this equipment arrives without the accompanying documentation, maintenance and support. In many cases, the equipment specifications are not suited to the local environment, which affects the durability and use of this equipment. The unfortunate result creates a vast array of medical equipment that lie about in various states of disrepair. Additionally, given the uniqueness of the environment and people in Africa, there is a need to design biomedical equipment that is suited to both the people and the environment. Although the graduates of the Makerere BME program participate in research, innovation and design of such low resource settings devices, these graduates lack a novel BME instrumentation course to implement their amazing innovations. This research thesis comes in to solve this dilemma by investigating economically effective lab components and skills necessary for designing such a course which will help grow the BME discipline and the institutional regional capacity to do basic science research.The first chapter of this research comments about the medical equipment situation in Uganda in addition to the BME program in Makerere University. This chapter provides the researcher’s motivation and hypothesis for carrying out this research.ivThe second chapter of this research focuses on the Duke BME instrumentation labs. This chapter concentrates on the 10 labs that the researcher carried out at Duke University and how such labs can gainfully be translated to the Makerere BME instrumentation course.The third chapter deals with a discussion of the instrumentation laboratory and course experience that has been available to the BME majors at Makerere to date. This discussion involves results generated by a survey taken from the BME students who have just completed this course and those who have already graduated.The fourth chapter discusses the current status and the researcher’s proposed BME lab design. Additionally, this chapter highlights the human resource, the current lab space dimensions, the furniture and fittings, the training equipment, lab reagents and consumables.The fifth chapter comments about the BME instrumentation course currently carried out. This chapter is presents the progress of the first offering of the new BME instrumentation course taught at Makerere University that was designed this past summer following the Duke course model.Finally, the last chapter six serves as the conclusion chapter for this thesis work. This chapter briefly analyzes the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) for the current Makerere University BME instrumentation course. The chapter finally provides some critical findings and thereafter provides some recommendations.