Electives In Tanzania

In Dar es Salaam you’ll see conditions you’ve never seen before like cerebral malaria and cholera. You can experience departments you might not have seen too. These include paediatrics, the infectious diseases unit, theatre, and specialist surgical wards like neurosurgery. There are unique opportunities on the psychiatric ward and in anaesthesiology too. You can focus in on specific areas of interest like paediatric HIV, or spend time in lots of departments to get an interdepartmental understanding of nursing in Tanzania. You will see some local students here too, so you can talk about the differences between nursing education too.

In Dar es Salaam, HIV and related cases are considerable issues. As such, you can attend an HIV clinic to get insight into how the condition is treated in a low-resource environment. Of course, you can also see how Tanzanian medicine is practised in areas like paediatrics, surgical wards like neurosurgery, and the infectious diseases unit. Speaking of infectious diseases, both communicable and non-communicable diseases are treated in A&E, with little attention paid to infection control. We also have fantastic opportunities on the psychiatric ward and in anaesthesiology. If you're looking for a medical elective in Africa, you should add Tanzania to your shortlist.

While you’re on placement here, you’ll get a good idea of what life is like for a Tanzanian midwife. You might choose to spend time in areas you know, like neonatal intensive care, theatre, postnatal ward and the labour ward. Or you might feel like pushing yourself by visiting specialist areas like the OBG department’s dedicated HIV ward. You’ll be supervised by local midwives, but you’ll also make friends with Tanzanian healthcare students doing their placements at the same time as you. They will help explain why local practises are so different from what you experience at home. Don’t be surprised if see things like doctors applying fundal pressure to help women deliver!

If you do your elective placement here in Dar es Salaam, you’ll see patients who’ve sustained injuries from mining accidents, RTAs, and even construction and logging accidents. You’ll see that equipment in the department is outdated, similar to some of our other destinations. But in Dar es Salaam, resources are even lower, which makes it hard for local therapists to effectively help patients. Despite this, therapists still manage to provide good rehabilitation for most of their patients. In terms of conditions, you’ll see things like lower back pain, severe strokes, cerebral palsy, delayed milestones, neuropathies, nerve injuries, contractures, arthritis, and post eclampsia.

In Dar es Salaam, you can get experience in A&E, or surgery. Or both. Your placement here is in a national referral hospital that hosts the main A&E department in the city. That means cases are often serious. As this is the only department of its kind in Tanzania, some patients travel from hundreds of miles away to be seen, even in an emergency. You’ll see a lot in terms of cases, sepsis with multi-organ failure, acute respiratory distress syndrome, cerebral malaria, metabolic disorders, polytrauma, blunt trauma, and penetrating trauma are all on the list. If you’re looking for an elective in Africa, Tanzania is a great choice.

Most radiography students will undertake a placement in our large national partner hospital in Dar es Salaam. You’ll scan and help diagnose cases of fractures, trauma, road traffic accidents, and tumors. You’ll see a lot of communicable disease too, as Zambia has much higher levels of conditions like TB and HIV than the UK. The department here is equipped to conduct general and orthopaedic radiography, ultrasound, fluoroscopy, CT, and MRI. If you’re interested in radiotherapy, you can get experience in a specialised cancer hospital too. They have a simulator unit, and administer external beam radiotherapy and intracavitary radiotherapy. They have a LINAC, and use a cesium 137 source orthovoltage machine.

You’ll do your placement in the dental department in one of Dar es Salaam’s best tertiary referral hospitals. Your options span oral surgery and oral pathology, preventative and community dentistry, and restorative dentistry. In the oral surgery and oral pathology department, you can sit in on oral surgeries, and join staff on their weekly ward rounds. In preventative and community dentistry, you can head out into the city with Tanzanian dentistry students. In the restorative dentistry department, you can get involved in four units — cariology, prosthodontics, periodontology, and dental biomaterials. If you’re interested, you can get experience with paedodontics too.

Trained professionals, hailing from a number of disciplines, staff the rehabilitative medicine department in our main partner hospital. The department receives both inpatients and outpatients, and (on average) sees around 20 patients per day. You can also head out with the team to help conduct home visits. The team also have a presence in the ICU. Typical cases that the rehabilitative medicine department receive include strokes, cerebral palsy, back pain, neuropathies, nerve injuries, contractures, arthritis, post eclampsia to name but a few.