Alumni & Friends
Bethel Focus
A Magazine for Alumni & Friends of Bethel University
Curing Powers: Alumnus Helps Heal Kenyans and Their Health Care System
Bruce Dahlman, M.D. is medical
director of the 200-bed Kinjabe
Hospital and is helping to
revolutionize the practice of
general medicine in rural areas.
By Holly Donato
Kenyans call him "bwana safari"which means "ever-traveling-guy" in Swahili. Since arriving at the Kinjabe Hospital in Kenya's Rift Valley in 1992, Bruce Dahlman '76 has been in constant motion to improve general medicine in that country.
While still treating patients in the 200-bed hospital and serving as its medical director, Dahlman has shuttled back and forth between the United States and Europe to Kenya for further training. And he's worked tirelessly with a university and other church-based hospitals to create Kenya's first residency in family medicine. The program, nearly one year old, aims to develop more family practitioners, internists, and pediatricians with a heart for long-term service in the remote tribal regions of Kenya.
Only 20 percent of Kenya's doctors serve rural areas, even though that's where 80 percent of the people live. The reason is economics. After completing government-funded medical school and an internship, new Kenyan doctors are required to serve for two years in a rural setting. But after that, many become specialists and opt for more lucrative practices in Nairobi and other larger cities.
"You're asking them to sacrifice,"said Dahlman during a visit in Bethel's Market Square last May while in town for his son Erik's graduation. "So there's this huge gap in service to the poor that the church hospitals were meeting, but with expatriate personnel who were less and less coming long term."Kenyan doctors who continued in rural areas, he said, needed further teaching in continuity of care, evidence-based treatment, and preventive medicine, which lie at the heart of good general practice.
The vision for a solution to the problem was just forming in 1995 when it was time for Bruce and Kate Dahlman and their three children to return from their three years of exploratory service at Kinjabe with Africa Inland Mission. "We had both decided we would go for the short term to see what the needs were and then prepare ourselves better for what we could do for the longer term," Dahlman explained.
Upon return to Minnesota, Kate entered training to become a nurse educator and Bruce became assistant director of the family practice residency at the University of Minnesota Medical School-Duluth, his alma mater. In that role, he took up loads of administrative work, including a curriculum reform project in which he wrote an integrative capstone course. In it, he called for more attention to the basics of listening to patients and tuning in to their spiritual needs—something new to the traditional bio-social-psycho model taught until then at the U of M.
"I tried to do it in a way that was not dogmatic, but to just relate that spiritual connections need to be addressed as part of the whole person, "Dahlman reflected. "In those years, I was developing my own philosophy of education without overtly realizing it."
In 2000, when the Dahlmans' oldest son graduated from high school in Duluth, the family headed back to Kenya, better equipped to move the family practice initiative forward. Dahlman worked with Kinjabe, its colleague church hospitals, and a critical new partner—Moi University Faculty of Health Sciences—to form a coalition called the Institute of Family Medicine (INFA-MED).
Dahlman and Dahlman:
A Christian Masai tribesman
renamed himself "Dahlman"
after his favorite doctor.
As INFA-MED's director, Dahlman become chief architect of what he had long dreamed of: a three-year post-graduate program in family residency. It is built on a mentorship model in which Kenyan resident doctors are paired up with Christian physicians for three years, practicing side-by-side in Kenya's tribal communities, such as the five outpost clinics operated by Kinjabe Hospital.
"How are you going to get somebody to sacrifice to go out to these areas? Only if you have a servant's heart,"Dahlman reasoned. "So how do you develop a servant's heart? The resident and mentor form a bond over time so that the young resident sees not just the good skills and the brilliant knowledge, but also the caring, the going-the-extra-mile," said Dahlman. "In order to make a difference in the world you have to have character,"which is what the residency program aims to build, along with skills.
Dahlman's innovative thinking, boundless energy, and organizational abilities have put him at the head of many projects, not always medical in nature. When he practiced in Grand Marais, Minn., for his first eight years in medicine, he also headed committees that planned a new airport and an $8 million hospital/clinic complex.
Years before at Bethel, Dahlman was coordinator of the Summer Missionary Program after spending a summer with Arctic Missions in remote Alaska. "It confirmed my interest in following medicine as a way of bringing faith and a service career together," he says. Even earlier influence came from a strong missionary program at First Baptist Church in his hometown of Cambridge, Minn.
There is satisfaction on Dahlman's face as he relates that Kenya's first family practice residency is accredited by the government and has its first three residents—five years after he first wrote the curriculum. But he's already looking for ways to improve it. He's been instrumental in forming Kenya's Association of Family Physicians, getting its continuing education program going, and booking instructors in heart attack response and trauma care from the United States to come and teach.
Bruce Dahlman's father,
Willis, is a 1950 graduate of
Bethel College. Erik Dahlman
'05 is now on a full-
scholarship Ph.D. program
in physics at the University
of Minnesota. His younger
brother, Ryan Dahlman, is
a junior in the College of
Arts & Sciences at Bethel.
In his own professional development, Dahlman is enrolled in the Masters of Health Professionals Education program in Maastricht, Netherlands, which keeps him traveling there for six-week intensives and occupied with online study. Besides teaching, fundraising, and logistics with INFA-MED, he also continues critical work at Kinjabe Hospital, including the coordination of a rapidly growing HIV treatment program and an effort to remodel a donated home into a more accessible outpatient clinic.
After witnessing thriving Christian churches and schools in formerly animistic Masai tribal communities, Dahlman has new appreciation for the God he serves. "A lot of people want to talk about how Christianity destroys cultures," he observed. "But I've seen how it fulfills and releases cultures."Then he said something that could describe his own non-stop life: "It's just amazing the spark that Christ creates when He comes into a believer. It awakens you to all that you can be."