Global Mental Health Webinar Series: Critical Cultural, and Practical Perspectives
Toronto Addis Ababa Academic Collaboration: Stumbling into a successful partnership!
Enabling high quality professions education is key to ensuring high quality healthcare globally. Partnerships between academic health sciences centers in high resource and low resourced settings are often formed as attempts to address healthcare disparities. As we enter such collaborative relationships, it is impossible to ignore the colonial legacies that created the inequities everyone is trying to overcome.
We describe the Toronto Addis Ababa Academic Collaboration (TAAAC), an educational partnership between the University of Toronto and Addis Ababa University (AAU), designed to help address an urgent need for current and increased university faculty to teach in the massive expansions of universities in Ethiopia. As TAAAC has developed and expanded, faculty at both institutions have recognized the need for clarity about the assumptions that underpin this shared work.
Thus addressing implicit issues of curriculum ownership, decision-making, control, expertise and funding that influence the nature of international educational partnerships is essential. TAAAC attempts to move towards egalitarian forms of knowledge exchange and partnership. We will describe the partnership and draw out lessons we have learned from our 16 years of work across our two institutions.
Speakers
Dawit Wondimagegn
Dawit Wondimagegn, MD is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Chief Executive Director of the College of Health Sciences, and Vice President of Addis Ababa University.
Clare Pain
Clare Pain MD, MSc, FRCPC, DSc (Hons) AAU, is Associate Professor of Psychiatry, University of Toronto, and Director of the Psychological Trauma Program, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto. Dr. Pain and Dr. Wondimagegn co-lead the Toronto Addis Ababa Academic Collaboration (TAAC), under which there are 24 educational partnerships between the University of Toronto and Addis Ababa University working to strengthen educational capacity and sustainability in post graduate training at AAU.
Moderator
Mónica Ruiz-Casares
PhD, MSc, MA, LLB
Associate Professor
Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry
McGill University
November 20, 2019
9:00-10:00 am (Montreal EDT)
Attendance: Online platform
Recordings
Recommended readings
Alem A, Pain C, Araya M & Hodges BD. Co-creating a psychiatric resident program with Ethiopians, for Ethiopians, in Ethiopia: the Toronto Addis Ababa Psychiatry Project (TAAPP). Acad Psychiatry. 2010; 34(6):424-432
Miriam Shuchman, Dawit Wondimagegn, Clare Pain & Atalay Alem, Partnering with local scientists should be mandatory, 2014; 20( 1) Nature Medicine
Whitehead C, Wondimagegn D, Baheretibeb Y, Mekasha A, Hodges BD. The international partner as invited guest: beyond colonial models of medical education, Academic Medicine. 2018; 93(12): 1760-1763.
Hodges BD, Health professions education and globalization: a call for reflexivity. Canadian Medical Education Journal. 2016, 7(3):e1-e3
