Practicing Evidence-Based Medicine in a Resource-Limited Country: Let’s Start at the Very Beginning

Critical care outcomes in Kenya are poor, with mortality rates of over 50% in public hospital Intensive Care Units (ICUs). Outcomes in well-resourced private hospital ICUs are a lot better on the other hand, but these facilities are often incredibly expensive and out of the reach of the common man.

Although the causes of these poor outcomes are multi-factorial, the lack of locally-derived data to create applicable guidelines for our resource-limited facilities may be one contributory factor.

Dr Wangari Waweru-Siika, from the Aga Khan University in Kenya focuses her research on developing a sustainable focused cardiac ultrasound (FoCUS) training programme for non-cardiologists in Kenya, where there are only 50 cardiologists for nearly 46.6 million people.

AfOx recently awarded a travel grant to Wangari and Dr Carl Heneghan from the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, Oxford to exchange ideas for the implementation of the FoCUS programme, share preliminary results of ongoing work in Kenya, identify opportunities and barriers for up-scaling FoCUS training in Kenya and embark on grant-writing to fund future research. Read about Wangari's experience and research in Oxford here.