July 25, 2008

Makerere Univeristy in Uganda – Institutionalizing Leadership into the Medical School Curriculum

For the past two years, Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, has been working with LMS to integrate a leadership program into their medical school curriculum. Makerere already had a unique program that sent medical students to rural communities for several weeks during each year of their education (called the Community-Based Education and Service or COBES program). A team of faculty members saw the value of adding leadership and management practices and processes to the existing field-based curriculum. Now students use LMS leadership practices to help them identify and address the challenges they face in their field sites. After two years of integrating LMS approaches into the COBES work, the Medical School plans to institutionalize the program as part of the formal medical curriculum. The integrated curriculum will be implemented during the first year of the medical curriculum beginning July 2009. There will be 250 medical students working in more than 20 COBES sites enrolled.