In Africa, HIV, infectious diseases and other severe health problems compounded by critical shortages of health workforce compromise effective health care delivery. In order to train the necessary number of medical doctors in Africa, medical schools need to produce more high quality doctors. This proposalassembles a five-Ugandan medical school consortium with JHU to catalyze capacity building and performanceenhancements in medical education, research, and environment geared towards improved service delivery. Funding this proposal will facilitate Ugandan universities to strengthen countrywide south-south institutional collaboration as a strategy to enhance quality in medical education with an increase in the number of healthworkers trained and retained in the country, especially in rural areas. This funding will strengthen the capacity of the Ugandan medical schools consortium to realize their joint mission "to ensure thetransformative innovative medical education built on strong sustainable systems to produce more healthworkers of consistently high quality to address health priorities like HIV/AIDS through service and research toimprove health outcomes for Uganda." The specific aims of the proposal are to improve the quality andrelevance of medical education and service training by developing learner-centered curricula to beimplemented at standardized community-based platforms for education, service, and research which geographically cover the entire country. Well-trained on-site supervisors will teach competencies necessaryto deliver locally relevant services in resource-limited environments. Next, incentives and support will beprovided to faculty and students to undertake transdisciplinary research at the community-based sites. Aseries of grants will be offered that will give students the opportunity to initiate operational research atcommunity sites, will increase the pipeline of basic science and family medicine advanced degrees, andencourage faculty development and retention through research grants with "twinning" opportunties with JHUfaculty. Finally, support systems capacity building will be emphasized to facilitate the efficient conduct ofeducation and research.
RELEVANCE:Improving medical education in resource-limited settings through Innovative curricula will result in a larger number of high quality health care workers with the competencies to address Ugandan health care prioritiessuch as HIV/AIDS and non-communicable disease such as cardiovascular disease and cancer