Radiography Training in Uganda

Age Froma represented MeduProf-S from 3-14 May to conduct a Radiography training course. Here is Age’s ‘story’:

“For the first two weeks of May I went to Uganda as a teacher from MeduProf-S.
It was my 5th time in this beautiful country: the people are nice and so is the weather. The next thing I like is that things never occur as you have planned!!

The main goal of the course was to give hands-on training on two diagnostic x-ray machines which the radiographers had already worked with for one month. Theoretical and practical education, as well as radiation protection were very important topics.

The training (theory and practice) of 7 radiographers took place in two hospitals (Masindi and Hoima). In Masindi there was a Basic Radiography System x-ray machine and in Hoima they had a more sophisticated machine that could also do tomography and fluoroscopy.

All 7 participants were graduated radiographers and had completed a three years training program between 3 and 25 years ago.

Many subjects discussed in the course were familiar to the participants, but they had also forgotten many things such as the units and quantities used in radiography, physics, radiation protection and radiobiologic aspects. The automatic exposure device, tomography as well as fluoroscopy were important topics to teach to enable the participants to be able to use the new machines to their full potential.

The course:
First each particpant had to answer 25 questions.
The questions had to be answered with a ‘yes’, ‘no’ or with a questionmark (?).
The answers indicated to me which subjects were (well) known and which were not. In this way I could be flexible with the contents of the course.

Basically my schedule consisted of two parts:

In the morning lessons with the handouts of powerpoint presentations were conducted. Many topics including ‘Units and quantities’, ‘X-ray tube (general principles)’, ‘Grids’, ‘Qualily Control’ etc were discussed with the group in a theoretical setting.

In addition many assignments were also discussed during the morning session. One assignment that the students really enjoyed concerned radiation protection: the students had to design a poster for their own hospital for the patients and their colleagues who come to the radiology department.

In the afternoon, after a question and answer session the hands-on practical lessons took place. First we looked at the possibilities of the machines. This could be rather short, because the students were generally very familiar with positioning in radiography. Radiation measurements recieved by the patients using diode monitoring equipment were taken. With the diode the absorbed dose of the patient and in the neighbourhood of the patient can be measured which illustrated the Inverse Square Law very well.
A nice addition was the fact we could do positioning and measurements on/with real patients!

At the end of the course all participants received a certificate.“