BUJUMBURA March 13th (ABP) – The Director General of Health Services and the Fight against AIDS at the Ministry of Public Health and the Fight against AIDS, Mrs. Cléophile Akindavyi, opened on Thursday, March 9, 2023, a workshop to reflect on the importance of a family doctor in Burundi. The workshop was organized by the Hope Africa University (UEA).
In her speech, Mrs. Akindavyi indicated that the ministry in charge of public health recognizes the contribution of the UEA in the health system of the Republic of Burundi.
She also pointed out that the UEA Faculty of Medicine is one of the three faculties that train doctors in Burundi. She also recalled the national health policy (PNS) which covers the ten-year period 2016-2025 and which was drawn up in January 2016 and structured around the values of solidarity, teamwork and equality, social justice, integrity and ethics, respect for human rights and gender equality.
She added that this policy aims to bring the policy to the highest possible level of health for its full participation in the multifaceted efforts of sustainable national development, stressing that family medicine will contribute to the implementation of that policy.
Taking the floor, the Dean of the Faculty of Health at UEA, Mr. Nestor Nsengiyumva, explained that the family doctor is a clinical specialty oriented towards primary health care. It is also a horizontal transversal approach that treats the patient in all individual, family and community dimensions. According to him, the family doctor will not replace other doctors but they will be able to provide care with a specialized level in all diseases.
The importance of that doctor is to facilitate patients who have serious illnesses but who are in the interior of the country and who do not have means of transport, to have a doctor easily because, he underlined, the family doctor will work mainly in the community. In addition, this is a doctor who is both a specialist and a general practitioner.