Health Sciences Communications
Emory University
Atlanta, GA 30322

Release date: Nov. 8, 1999
Contact: Sarah Goodwin, Director, 404-727-3366 or sgoodwi@emory.edu.

Emory School of Medicine Helps Improve Health Care in Republic of Georgia

The present state of health care in the independent Republic of Georgia is just short of agonal. In the early 1990s, children were going years without routine immunizations. In the spring of 1992, the American International Health Alliance (AIHA) worked with the Emory University School of Medicine, Grady Memorial Hospital and Morehouse School of Medicine to set up the Atlanta-Tblisi partnership, one of 21 such partnerships between U.S. institutions and republics of the former Soviet Union. The partnership's goal is to contribute expertise, manpower and supplies to improve health care in the Republic of Georgia.

Emory's volunteer effort, led by Kenneth Walker, M.D., professor of medicine, has three targets: the Ministry of Health, and consequently the entire country; Tblisi State Medical Institute, which is the national medical school; and City Hospital No. 2, a 400-bed general hospital similar to Grady. Since 1992, dozens of Emory faculty physicians, nurses and medical students have visited Tblisi-and vice-versa.

The program includes a wide variety of initiatives that are transforming medical care in the Republic of Georgia from the ground up. Emory doctors have engaged in projects ranging from development of a comprehensive plan to transform the children's hospital and maternal hospital in Tblisi into a model national perinatal center, to establishing joint research projects on resistant tuberculosis, to addressing a newly emerging AIDS epidemic there. Emory's Health Sciences Library has established of a state-of-the-art "virtual medical library" network across the Republic of Georgia that is connected to the Internet and to Emory's library.

The medical school also has taken a leading role in health reform efforts across the country, has encouraged American manufacturers to donate updated medical equipment, and has established several ongoing information exchange and clinical programs at Emory for both doctors and medical students of Tblisi.

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