Awards & Grants
WFSA Sponsored Fellow
CPAS Pediatric Anesthesia Fellowship Bursary
Surgical disease kills more people annually than HIV, TB and malaria combined. Unfortunately, surgical and anesthesia capacity is least where it is needed most. There is a very limited pool of skilled personnel available to provide expert anesthesia care to the sickest of Africa’s children. The Canadian Pediatric Anesthesia Society (CPAS), The World Federation of Societies of Anesthetists (WFSA), and The Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital (RXH) are all motivated to increase the number of pediatric sub-specialty trained anesthetists in low- and middle-income African countries. Five billion people, many of them children, lack access to safe surgical care.
CPAS has endorsed the creation of a bursary to fund global health fellowships in pediatric anesthesia over the next three years. A partnership has been formed between CPAS, The WFSA and RXH in order to fund a pediatric anesthesia fellowship training position. This training position would be specific for an African (non – South African) specialist anesthesia physician looking to expand on their skillset, so that after completion of this 1-year fellowship they would have the skills to provide safe and effective pediatric anesthesia care to children in their country of origin. Red Cross Children’s Hospital in Cape Town offers the opportunity to provide a fellowship candidate with a comprehensive scientific program on a background of a patient population and disease incidence that would be very similar to what they would see in their home country.
Cape Town is an expensive city and it will cost about CA$40,000 to provide a 1-year training program for a candidate (most of this would be towards living expenses for the fellow). CPAS has committed to sponsor $5,000 per year for three years, with the balance coming from other Canadian donors and funds raised by the African Pediatric Fellowship Program (APFP). The funds will be transferred to the APFP and distributed to the fellow on a monthly basis.
Our inaugural fellow is named Dr. Henry Nchimaunya. He is specialty trained in anesthesiology and works in Zambia. He will start his fellowship in Cape Town in early 2021. The funding for this fellowship for 2021 is derived from 4 sources: CPAS ($5000), Alberta Children’s Hospital Department of Anesthesia (9700), CHEO Department of Anesthesia (4400) with the remainder being raised by the African Pediatric Fellowship Program (APFP).
The fellowship be under the direction of Dr. Graeme Wilson. Drs. Rebecca Gray and Heidi Meyer will play key roles in this training programme. There are goals and objectives, an evaluation rubric, funding for conference attendance, research involvement and training in simulation.
The WFSA approves of this fellowship and is supportive, but it is not involved with it directly and isn’t providing funding. I will provide interim reports on this inaugural fellowship year and will look into having Dr. Nchimaunya present about his experience at an upcoming CPAS meeting. It is our hope that we can begin the process of identifying a fellow for 2022 in the coming 6 months.
Respectfully submitted,
David Rosen