They are medical doctors, each has received a fellowship to study medical education in the United
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| Drs. Orazklychev Orazklych (left), from Turkmenistan, and Devendra Pant, Nepal, are studying medical education at UND.Pant is wearing a “topi,” a national symbol of honor and dignity. |
States, and both are deeply committed to improving health care for the people of their respective countries. Devendra Pant, MD, from Kathmandu, Nepal, and Orazklychev Orazklych, MD, of Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, came to UND to learn particularly about family medicine and rural health care in North Dakota, the smallest-populated state in the U.S. to offer medical education.
Pant received a fellowship from the Foundation for the Advancement of International Medical Education and Research, based in Philadelphia. Selected through a competitive process, he was among 10 physicians from countries in Africa as well as Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, South Korea, Pakistan, the Philippines and Mongolia to receive the fellowship.
Joining the UND medical school in 2004 as an international fellow, Pant has been a graduate teaching assistant since 2005, pursuing a doctoral degree in educational leadership from UND. He is a faculty member in the Medical Education Department, at the Tribhuvan University Institute of Medicine, which accepts about 60 students (in the Bachelor of Medicine and the Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) program) annually, slightly fewer than UND’s medical school enrollment. “In 1971, a new National Education System was started in Nepal,” greatly influenced by Western ideas originating in the United States, Canada and Australia, he said. Based on results of a health care survey in the districts of Nepal, a needs-based and country-specific system of medical education and “a first tier of education that affected my generation” was developed.
Pant studied medicine under that system and went on to complete his medical degree at L’Vov State Medical Institute in Eastern Europe. After returning to Nepal, he worked full-time in the Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital as a clinic house officer and senior house officer. Supported by the World Health Organization, he also studied at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, where he earned a master’s degree in health personnel education and delved into problem-based learning.
Pant is dedicated to bringing strategies for problem-based learning back to Nepal. When completed in 2010, his PhD will prepare him to assume a leadership position at his medical school, where he and his colleagues “want to create a National Center for Health Professions Education and Development,” he says.
His background includes training people at the grassroots level in primary care with doctors in mission hospitals in Nepal. He sees problem-based learning, with its focus on individual attention and more interactive, engaged learning, as an effective method for producing the type of physician his country needs.
