The Public Health Fellowship Program for Laboratory Leaders in Uganda; a Golden Opportunity to Advance Public Health Service

The capacity to detect, assess, notify and report potential public health events of both national and international concern relies heavily on an efficient laboratory system. However, Uganda faces are a number of challenges that compromise the quality of laboratory systems performance especially in public health laboratories. Examples of such challenges include lack of specialized training for laboratory professionals in the areas of leadership and management, lack of adequate management training in laboratory science education, uncertain career path, and limited input into the national financial planning for health funding by laboratory leaders.

In order to address the above challenges, the Uganda National Institute of Public Health (UNIPH) (https://uniph.go.ug/) at the ministry of health (MOH) through the Public Health Fellow-ship Program (PHFP), the human resources‘ capacity building arm of UNIPH, will be implementing a two-year field-based laboratory leadership fellowship program with funding from US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This program will build laboratory leaders in Uganda with key competencies in laboratory systems and infrastructure, leadership, laboratory-based disease surveillance and out-break investigation, laboratory quality management systems, policy and program management, research and communication.

The target beneficiaries to this program include laboratory professionals with a master‘s degree in a medical laboratory related field of practice The first cohort will kick start work come January, 2023 with didactic sessions which are 25% of the 2 years‘ period and thereafter be deployed to the field for the remaining 75%-time frame. Graduates from the PHFP-Laboratory Leadership Program will be employed by ministry of health, and or non-government organizations among others to lead the public health laboratory activities using the one health approach and will work alongside the field epidemiologists.

This program stems from the global laboratory leadership program that was designed and is being implement-ed by US CDC, Association of Public Health Laboratories, European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, World Organization for Animal Health and World Health Organization. Eligible applicants are highly encouraged to look out for the ad-vert in local newspapers and the UNIPH website to apply for the Public Health Fellowship Program for Laboratory Leaders in Uganda.