MBA Students' Journey to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (Black Lion and Fistula Hospital)

The following is written by Ben Mirtes and Lianna Kong MBA 2011 for their Applied Management Research Project:

In researching leading practices in surgical capacity building in sub-Saharan Africa, we identified Ethiopia as one of the countries that has had success in several programs it has implemented and continues to build upon its efforts through aggressive healthcare capacity building initiatives. On our second day in Ethiopia, we visited the Black Lion Hospital or Tikur Anbesa (in Amharic, Ethiopia’s national language). Black Lion is the largest public hospital in Ethiopia serving the residents of the nation’s capital, Addis Ababa, and anyone who can access the hospital from surrounding areas. Unfortunately, the hospital does not have the capacity to meet the demand for its services. Hundreds of people patiently wait in an outdoor courtyard, which serves as a waiting room before seeing a doctor.
Black Lion one of the largest teaching hospitals in the country affiliated with Addis Ababa University. In addition to its medical school, Black Lion has a very robust training program for surgical residents. The surgical department strives to increase their capacity in not just the number of cases they see, but also increase the number of faculty and expand their training programs to include more sub-specialties.
We were very fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct interviews with members of the administration and teaching faculty – this including the Dean of the Hospital, the Director of Surgery, and 2 senior surgeons. One of their many recommendations for improving surgical capacity included partnering with teaching hospitals affiliated with universities in India. The benefits of such collaborations are that the pathology is similar to Africa’s making the training very relevant to the needs of Ethiopia and residents/faculty can do hands-on learning, which they are unable to do here in the U.S. due to insurance reasons. Training in India also allows surgeons to both climb the learning curve faster – as they attend to more cases in India due to the high volume and efficiency in the number of cases that are seen in a day – and learn new surgical techniques because they see a large variety of cases. Additionally, given that surgical training requires a significant amount of capital, they need funding for new equipment and as well as training to use this equipment. While the hospital itself could use additional structure and process design, the human capital they have is very impressive.