Education and Research

Education

Our Section meets the institution’s educational objectives by: 

• Holding weekly ID seminars for internal medicine residents and ID fellows throughout the year. 

• Providing daily bedside teachings to our internal medicine residents during ID rounds. 

• Teaching internal medicine residents in the ID outpatient clinic. 

• Supervising internal medicine resident dissertations in ID, interdepartmental research studies, and international collaborative research projects. 

• Giving general updates in ID relevant to other providers including nurses in continuing medical and nursing education initiatives. 

• Presenting at international and local ID conferences including those hosted by the HIV Clinicians Society of Kenya and the Infectious Diseases Society of Kenya.

Infectious Diseases Fellowship 

The Infectious Diseases (ID) Fellowship is a sub-specialty training program for doctors who have completed residency training in Internal Medicine. It is modeled after North American fellowships using Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) guidelines that have been adapted to East Africa. Fellows will spend the majority of their time rotating at the Aga Khan University Hospital in Nairobi, Kenya, which has 3 full-time and 1 part-time faculty certified in ID and one of the best diagnostic and microbiological laboratories in the country.

In addition to the Nairobi-based experience, ID fellows will spend 4 months of training at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada. The fellowship is 2 years in duration and includes extensive inpatient and outpatient supervised clinical experience. Graduating fellows will have expertise at the subspecialty level in a broad range of infectious diseases including HIV and AIDS, antimicrobial usage and stewardship, hospital infection control, tuberculosis (TB), and complicated inpatient and outpatient infections. 

Research is an important part of the fellowship and the fellow will engage in a research project which will be submitted for publication prior to completion of the program. Current grant-funded research projects include those in HIV drug resistance and cervical cancer screening and treatment among HIV-infected women. Other potential research topics include the study of non-communicable diseases and opportunistic infections among HIV patients as well as into the development of antimicrobial resistance and hospital-acquired infections. The ID fellowship at AKU is a unique opportunity to initiate an academic medical research career and become a nationally and internationally recognized leader in ID and HIV.

Key Responsibilities

ID training activities under ID faculty supervision include:

• Inpatient ID clinical service and consultations from Medicine, Pediatrics, Surgery, and other departments

• Outpatient ID clinical services including HIV, hepatitis, immunizations, and TB

• Microbiology

• Teaching of Medicine residents, medical students, and other trainees 

• Participation in ID seminars and conferences

• Participation in ID-related hospital committees including infection control and antimicrobial stewardship

• ID research to include submission of manuscript(s) for publication

• External ID rotations at UBC and other sites in Kenya and abroad

Requirements

• Completion of an Internal Medicine Residency

• Eligible for registration by the Kenya Medical Practitioners & Dentists Board which must be completed before starting the fellowship

Personal Attributes

To Apply

Research