Rethinking undergraduate anaesthesia: an African perspective on a missed opportunity to grow specialist anaesthesia training

Abstract

With an anaesthesia specialist provider density that falls short of what a functioning health system needs, African countries cannot meet the growing need for safe surgery. Upscaling postgraduate training to meet this shortfall will require more recruits to take up trainee positions. Unfortunately, few undergraduate medical students consider anaesthesiology a future career choice in Africa due to a consistently documented poor perception of the speciality brought on by uninspiring exposure during short clinical rotations. The result is a lopsided preference for surgical specialities that are not appropriately matched with interest in anaesthesia as a career choice. As medical education expands throughout the continent, we explored the connections in the supply of specialist trainee applicants and discussed the challenges faced at each level that reduce the potential growth in the speciality. We proposed measures that could reverse the trend by enhancing undergraduate anaesthesiology rotations to improve the clinical abilities of all medical graduates and increase enrolment in postgraduate training programmes.