Dean's Message
Dr. Julia Songok
Dean, School of Medicine
The Moi University School of Medicine (MUSOM) is located at the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital (MTRH) out-patient building at the MTRH-Moi University College of Health Sciences (MUCHS) complex on Nandi road in Eldoret.
MUSOM was established in 1988 as a Faculty of Health Sciences, with the first group of students being admitted in 1990. The Faculty of Health Sciences was divided into School of Public Health (SPH) and School of Medicine (SOM) in July 2005 in accordance with the University strategic plan of 2005-2015. The School was later to give birth to School of Dentistry (SOD), the School of Nursing (SON) and the recently established Institute of Biomedical Informatics (IBMI).
The philosophy of the School entails training health professionals in the context of the community in which they will later practice. It encourages the student to acquire the important skills of self-directed learning, problem solving and effective communication. In addition, the School emphasizes not only curative, hospital-based Medicine, but also prevention of disease and promotion of good health through its community oriented approach.
The School is headed by the Dean, assisted by 18 Heads of Departments and several Committees that help run the affairs of the school. We currently offer 4 undergraduate programs (Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBChB), and BSc programmes in Medical Laboratory Science, Physical Therapy, and Medical Psychology) and 16 postgraduate programs in the various medical specialities.
Several other interesting and market-driven courses are under development, in line with our goal of providing appropriate manpower for the health needs of the modern world. In the next year we shall be offering Clinical Fellowships in Oncological subspecialties, as well as advanced programmes in basic science and clinical areas.
Our curricula are innovative and centre around the needs of our students, with outcomes that are meant to benefit the community in which our school is situated. Our problem-based learning approach to the education of health professionals has been acknowledged globally as the best way to ensure that appropriate knowledge, skills and attitudes are gained and maintained over an individual’s professional life.
A key component in our program is the elective term, during which we send most of our learners to partner institutions all over the world in order to expose them to different perspectives in medicine and health care in general.
Apart from teaching, our School excels in clinical service provision, and our clinical staff comprises the foremost medical experts in the region. Our primary teaching Hospital is the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital (MTRH), but we also offer services through a network of health facilities throughout western Kenya through the Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare (AMPATH) network. Specialists affiliated to our School offer services to Kenyans in the hospitals surrounding our campus, and often engage in free health care campaigns to reach the rural and peri-urban poor.
The Moi University School of Medicine hosts one of the largest research centers in the region, and our research output continues to inform policy and practice in Kenya and globally. Our researchers are at the cutting edge of research in HIV/AIDS, Child Health, Mental Health, and Chronic Disease Management, and we continuously engage in collaborative research with partners in other centers around the world. We welcome partnerships that will generate outcomes that will further knowledge and practice in the health professions, and industry collaborations are encouraged in order to provide the environment to demonstrate the effectiveness of our research.
For our learners, we provide opportunities for numerous extracurricular activities, including games and sports, music, drama, and excursions. We seek to give our learners a holistic experience, in pursuit of moulding health workers who are themselves healthy in all respects as encapsulated in the World Health Organisation’s definition of health. MUSOM is a great place to learn, and to make lifetime connections that make a difference not only in the lives of faculty and learners, but also in the world around us.
For more information, please contact us on: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.;Tel: +254777248196