Temple University Joins the AMPATH Consortium
Temple University is the newest member of the AMPATH Consortium joining 15 other academic medical centers around the world working in partnership with university and hospital partners in Kenya, Ghana, Mexico and Nepal.
Temple’s focus will initially be surgery and pharmacy within the AMPATH Ghana partnership which is led by the University for Development Studies (UDS) School of Medicine and Tamale Teaching Hospital (TTH) in Tamale, Ghana. New York University Grossman School of Medicine (NYUGSOM) leads the AMPATH Consortium in the partnership.
The Katz School of Medicine at Temple University hosts nearly 900 medical students on two campuses and is the 10th most diverse U.S. medical school with a reputation for training humanistic clinicians. The Temple University School of Pharmacy leads innovations in pharmacy education, practice and science. Temple University Hospital serves an urban population in North Philadelphia including areas with high rates of poverty, addiction and gun violence.
“This is the kind of health system where professionals thrive and the type of medical school that attracts applicants who truly understand the importance of social determinants of health on patient populations. They recognize the critical nature of healthcare in addressing social justice and equity issues,” said Zoe Maher, MD, FACS, associate professor of surgery who will lead Temple’s surgical involvement in AMPATH.
Temple began its global surgery relationship with TTH in Ghana in 2010 with a vision to contribute to health equity in surgical service delivery for all people worldwide. What began as a partnership for clinical rotations has now evolved into a partnership that includes education, clinical care and research.
Dr. Maher began working with Professor Stephen Tabiri, now dean of UDS School of Medicine, when he was a surgical specialist and she was a surgical resident who traveled to TTH for training. “When Prof. Tabiri reached out to us and said that TTH was joining as the clinical site for the AMPATH Ghana partnership and that he was interested in us considering becoming consortium members, it really couldn’t have made any more sense for us as an institution. We so believe in the mission and vision of AMPATH. Institutionally, Temple fulfills much of the same mission and vision for our community that AMPATH Ghana is looking to partner with TTH to help support,” she continued.
Dr. Maher plans to collaborate with faculty from NYUGSOM in the AMPATH Ghana partnership, to develop surgical techniques training and develop workforce capacity through virtual clinical conferences and medical student and resident exchange programs. Temple plans to have surgical faculty onsite in Tamale for at least 6 weeks per year. It anticipates continued research on understanding the barriers to accessing trauma care and improving access and quality of trauma care.
Tina Tran, PharmD, has been working with the AMPATH since 2015. She came to Eldoret, Kenya, as a pharmacy resident, and later transitioned to be an NIH Fogarty Fellow and research faculty with Purdue University within the AMPATH Kenya partnership. She will now lead Temple’s pharmacy involvement in AMPATH Ghana as a faculty member at Temple University School of Pharmacy. The partnership will include advancing clinical pharmacy services, education and research to improve access to essential medications and pharmacy services at TTH and peripheral health facilities within AMPATH Ghana.
“We are very excited to have Temple join the AMPATH Ghana team and the AMPATH Global team more broadly. There has been a long-standing relationship between Temple and TTH, but we’re really hoping that, with the infrastructure and consortium engagement of AMPATH overall, we’ll be able to take it to the next level in line with what everyone wants on both sides of the ocean. We are excited about that prospect,” said Rajesh Vedanthan, MD, MPH, director of the section for global health at NYU Langone Health and lead for the AMPATH Consortium within AMPATH Ghana.
Faculty members from several AMPATH partners including Temple University recently met in Ghana.
In additional to Temple and NYU, current members of the AMPATH Consortium are:
Brown University
Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin
Duke University
Indiana University (AMPATH Global Secretariat)
Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine
Linköping University (Sweden)
Mount Sinai
Purdue University
Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health
University of Alberta
University of California San Francisco
University of Louisville
University of Toronto
University of Virginia
About AMPATH
AMPATH is the Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare, a global network building cross-cultural partnerships between universities and academic health centers to strengthen health systems and tackle health disparities, train future global health leaders and foster healthcare innovations to improve health worldwide.