Purdue Kenya Partnership honored with prestigious regional award

November 4, 2014  


WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - The Purdue Kenya Partnership, which pairs faculty and students in the College of Pharmacy with counterparts in Kenya, was honored Tuesday (Nov. 4) as a recipient of an Engagement Scholarship/W.K. Kellogg Foundation Engagement Award.

The prestigious award is intended to recognize institutions that have redesigned learning, discovery and engagement to develop stronger links within communities. The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) and the Engagement Scholarship Consortium, a nonprofit educational association, sponsor the award.

The Purdue Kenya Partnership (PKP) was recognized during the APLU's annual meeting in Orlando, where university representatives received a plaque and a $5,000 cash prize.

"The Purdue Kenya Partnership is the premier international engagement program associated with any U.S. college of pharmacy," said Steve Abel, Purdue's associate vice president for engagement. "By design, this program reflects a symbiotic relationship between our Kenyan counterparts and Purdue University, resulting in optimal benefit to each."

The Purdue Kenya Partnership began in 2003, when the College of Pharmacy partnered with the Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare (AMPATH) consortium in Eldoret, Kenya.

Since then, the program has grown from a student-training program to a comprehensive clinical effort embedded in the community, said Ellen Schellhase, the program's coordinator.

It involves a team of four College of Pharmacy faculty members. Based in Kenya are Sonak Pastakia, associate professor of pharmacy practice, and Rakhi Karwa, clinical assistant professor of pharmacy practice; based at the West Lafayette campus are Schellhase and Monica Miller, both clinical associate professors of pharmacy practice. Also involved are 20 Kenyan pharmacists, seven of whom have received postgraduate training through the program; 48 pharmacy technologists; five research assistants; and 25 support staff. 

Additionally, a novel clinical pharmacy residency offered through the Purdue Kenya Partnership allows postgraduate trainees from Purdue and Kenya to collaboratively build patient care and leadership skills. Because of the success of this program's Kenyan graduates, the Kenyan government is formalizing this training program as a master's degree in clinical pharmacy.

PKP also involves partnerships between Purdue and Moi University School of Medicine and Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital, both in Eldoret. Part of the program involves hosting Purdue students in Kenya and providing six-month internships to students from the University of Nairobi.

"What sets PKP apart is an unrelenting drive to address the barriers that underserved populations in the developing world continually face in trying to access basic services that the rest of the world takes for granted," Pastakia said. "Whether it is creating a center that attempts to break the poverty cycle for street children or developing a novel model for portabilized care for patients with chronic diseases, there is no challenge too big for our team to take on to benefit underserved populations. "

The Purdue Kenya Partnership's team works in Kenya to provide care with an emphasis on diabetes, rheumatic heart disease, cancer and HIV in ambulatory and in-patient settings. It has cumulatively enrolled more than 140,000 HIV patients using comprehensive care models previously considered impossible in the developing world due to lack of adequate infrastructure, providers and other resources, Schellhase said.

Further, the program trains providers and shifts tasks to address personnel needs, Schellhase said. It also focuses on care models that are sustainable in the long term, including using group care in rural settings, coordinating with established peers and creating a pharmacy designed to address medication availability issues.

"The Purdue Kenya Partnership fulfills the spirit of the award because it is truly a community effort - our community partners include pharmacists, patients, the local hospital and AMPATH," Schellhase said.

"Our program focuses on the needs of the community and works with Kenyan pharmacists to take leadership in these initiatives. We're proud to say that Purdue is the only college of pharmacy in the U.S. with faculty members on the ground in a resource-constrained setting working with the community to build strong links, to guide learning and to lead research."

In the future, PKP plans to share its practice model with professionals in other resource-strained areas, such as India, Namibia and Tanzania, according to the award submission.

More information about the Engagement Scholarship/W.K. Kellogg Foundation Engagement Awards and the C. Peter Magrath/Community Engagement Award is available online.

Writer: Amanda Hamon Kunz, 765-496-1325, ahamon@purdue.edu

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