A Yale librarian upgrades Internet access for physicians in Uganda

When librarian Mark Gentry, M.A., M.L.S., set out to expand Internet access at a hospital in Uganda, he experienced déjà vu. “The speed of the Internet took me back 15 years to the beginning of the Web, when we had dial-up modems,” said Gentry, the clinical support librarian at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library.

Gentry learned about the idiosyncrasies of satellite-based Internet service in Uganda when he joined the Yale-Makerere collaboration, a partnership that includes the School of Medicine, Makerere University and Mulago Hospital in Kampala. Since 2006 Yale attendings and residents have traveled to Kampala for rotations at Mulago Hospital, and Ugandan residents are now coming to Yale for clinical training.

While visiting Mulago Hospital in the spring of 2008, Gentry streamlined Internet use for physicians by setting up a home page that links directly to such often-used functions as e-mail and online journals. “Click: you go right to it. Because every time you get an intermediate page, you have to wait from 10 to 30 seconds,” said Gentry. Meanwhile a Yale resident compiled CDs that allow Ugandan colleagues to bypass the Internet—the disks contain copyright-free information on diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis and malaria.

Gentry next began building up the library for the Department of Medicine at Mulago Hospital, where the medical textbooks were 20 years old. Gentry collected 50 essential texts that were hand-delivered to Kampala. Up-to-date books are a godsend, said Ugandan resident Fred Okuku, M.D. During a five-month rotation at Yale last spring, Okuku discovered journal articles about research done in Uganda that he’d been unable to access at home.

While in Uganda, Gentry promoted a free Internet service called HINARI; sponsored by the World Health Organization for health care workers in developing countries, it provides links to nearly 4,000 journals.

Gentry said the Makerere collaboration has been a natural extension of his work on Cedar Street. “Part of my job as a clinical support librarian is to do what I can to support our people wherever they are.”