Adolescent Projects
Dr. Sabina Bakeera-Kitaka and Dr. Betsy Pfeffer have worked collaboratively since 2007 to help scale up Adolescent Healthcare in Uganda with the support of their respective institutional affiliations. Sabrina completed an elective rotation at Columbia University’s Primary Care Ambulatory Care Network Adolescent Health Clinic in NYC. Their work on how global health collaborations can improve adolescent care has been accepted for presentation both locally and internationally. With the formation of GHI in 2018, their goal is to continue this important work to ensure that every child and adolescent grows and reaches their fullest potential.
Photo courtesy of Bryan Watt, humanitarian photographer
Formation of the Society of Adolescent Health Uganda (SAHU)
SAHU (http://www.sahu.ug) was created in 2012 and is an organization whose mission is to promote comprehensive adolescent health, growth, and development in Uganda through knowledge dissemination, research, advocacy and affiliation with other societies and bodies involved in adolescent health. It is led by experts from Columbia & Makerere Universities. Dr. Bakeera-Kitaka is the current president. SAHU aims to bring providers caring for adolescents together so that they can promote optimal physical and mental health for all adolescents helping them grow into fully functional adults who can achieve their dreams.
Makerere University's Friday Adolescent Health Clinic at Mulago Hospital
The clinic is the first public adolescent health clinic in Uganda and delivers comprehensive care to all patients who attend. Dr. Sabrina Bakeera-Kitaka is the director of the Adolescent Health training program at Makerere University College of Health Sciences and founding the Friday Adolescent Health Clinic in 2013 was Dr. Kitaka’s dream. It is Uganda’s first public adolescent clinic delivering comprehensive care to all adolescent patients.
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Providers include pediatricians, nurses, pediatric residents, and a volunteer psychologist
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The clinic is an adolescent medicine training ground for students and pediatric residents
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12,000 individual patients have been seen in the past 10 years
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.Comprehensive care is delivered including physical exams, reproductive and mental health care, management of chronic illnesses, and immunization updates
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Skill building is offered at each visit and broader skill building sessions are given twice a year to 150 invited adolescents.
Ugandan Adolescent Health Workshops and Conferences
Education and knowledge exchange is one of the most important and sustainable ways for providers from low resource settings to grow, learn and thus affect change. The Makerere & Columbia University Departments of Pediatrics in Collaboration (MUCU) began annual heath trainings in Uganda in 2010. With the formation of GHI, we are committed to continuing the conferences that we began with support of our affiliated universities. Our next conference will be held in Kampala May 21st-22nd, 2024.
Previous Workshops and Conferences
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Three annual adolescent health training workshops in Kampala (2010, 2011 and 2012)
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Six 2-day Clinical and Scientific conferences (2013, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019) with the support of SAHU, Makerere and Columbia University. Over 100 participants attended including providers caring for adolescent populations in Uganda, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Rwanda and Kenya.
Research Collaboration
Dr. Melissa Stockwell, chief of the division of child and adolescent health at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. She was introduced to Dr. Bakeera-Kitaka at the 2018 Adolescent Health Conference in Uganda. They are both passionate about initiatives to improve pediatric and adolescent vaccine uptake and received an NIH grant in 2020 funding a five-year project to assess the effectiveness of text message reminders on improving timely human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination in Ugandan adolescents. Drs. Melissa Stockwell and Sabrina Bakeera-Kitaka are principal investigators and Dr. Pfeffer is a co-investigator on this grant.
