ABSTRACT

The United Republic of Tanzania faces an overwhelming burden of both communicable and noncommunicable diseases and an acute shortage of well-trained critical care providers particularly in rural areas. Limited numbers of doctors and nurses undermine effective scale-up of antiretroviral therapy to the estimated 1.4 million people living with HIV/AIDS. Further health professionals are ill-prepared when they graduate to work unsupervised in rural districts. The Government has asked schools to increase class sizes and enhance curricula but there are too few faculty to meet these pedagogical demands and simultaneously pursue research interests. To address these issues, three major Tanzanian universities - Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences (MUHAS), Kilimanjaro Christian Medical University University College (KCMUCo), and the Catholic University of Health and Allied Sciences (CUHAS) - have formed the Transforming Health Education in Tanzania Consortium (THET) with two long-standing United States partners, the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and Duke University.