The future of cleft
and craniomaxillofacial care

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Tanzania

Bugando Medical Center

Collaborative Project With A Cranio-Maxillo-Facial Multidisciplinary Unit In Mwanza, Tanzania.

In the first week of November 2023, we started this new project with the Bugando Medical Center (BMC), in Mwanza, Tanzania, for collaboration in the development of a Multidisciplinary Unit of Craniomaxillofacial Surgery. During that week a Spanish team headed by

Fernando Garcia Marin form Madrid, visited the BMC to give a few days of theoretical and practical training, and to hold several meetings with the hospital management to advance this collaborative project.

The Bugando Medical Centre is the second largest hospital in Tanzania and serves a population of about 20 million people, one third of the Tanzanian population. It serves especially large rural regions around Lake Victoria, where cranio-maxillo-facial care is virtually non-existent. So far, many of these patients die, or survive with severe sequelae and stigmata, due to pathologies that would have a solution in our environment.

In sub-Saharan Africa, 93% of the population has difficulty accessing safe, timely and affordable surgical services. Cranio-maxillo-facial pathology is part of this great tragedy of lack of access to surgery in these countries and few people, if any, have access to treatment for these problems, which include malformations, benign and malignant tumours, trauma and its sequelae, infections, etc.

Oral and maxillofacial surgery operates already as a small unit within the Dental Department in BMC. It was established in 2018 with only 3 staff in the department, one oral and maxillofacial surgeon and 2 dental surgeons.

The BMC has therefore decided to develop this cranio-maxillo-facial Multidisciplinary Unit in order to establish a long-term sustainable service for patients with cranio-maxillofacial pathologies to have access to a comprehensive treatment programme at this Hospital.

The most important factor for the future development of surgical services in sub-Saharan Africa is the training of surgeons, anaesthetists and other healthcare personnel. This is the area where international organisations can help the most through financial and educational support.

Therefore, the main objective of our project is to support the training of local surgeons through an exchange programme between the BMC and various organizations and institutions within the MAX TRAIN platform of the European Association of Craniomaxillofacual Surgery.

At the moment we have funds to initiate a fellowship programme, whereby two surgeons from Bugando Medical Center will spend a one-year training period in European hospitals and in India. These funds have been donated by Future Faces. The first two surgeons are already in Madrid and will shorlty move to Queen Victoria Hospial, East Grinstead and thence, next year, to Hyderabad. More news to follow.

The collaboration project will also include visits to BMC by European specialists to provide theoretical and practical training in the field, financing of patients’ expenses, financing of equipment and infrastructure, and continuous support with permanent communication throughout the year between the specialists in Tanzania and the medical teams in the international organizations to cover all healthcare needs.

To make all this possible, we need the help of all interested organizations and institutions. This is a multi-partner project, which so far has the collaboration of the following (and is open to new partners):

As we have said before, achieving universal access to surgery (including oral and craniomaxillofacial surgery) for all human beings is one of the Sustainable Development Goals set by the UN for 2030, and this requires the cooperation, among many others, of the entire global Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery community and our professional organisations.