African Inland Church Kijabe Hospital has been serving patients in the Rift Valley of Kenya for over 100 years now. Started in 1915 as a medical evangelism outpatient unit, it has grown to an over 350-bed facility that does more than 8000 surgical procedures per year and attends to over 130,000 outpatients. It has become a renowned tertiary teaching and referral facility, as recognized by the government of Kenya under the Kenya Medical Practitioners & Dentists Board, serving patients in Kenya and beyond. Kijabe Hospital has 3 satellite clinics in Nairobi, Naivasha, and Marira.

Kijabe Hospital partners with Bethany Kids to provide excellent pediatric care and runs Kenya’s only multidisciplinary clinic for children with developmental disabilities.

The hospital is known for its excellence in training health professionals. It houses East Africa’s only pediatric surgery fellowship training program. It is also a training site for East Africa’s first fellowship in pediatric emergency and critical care medicine. In addition, the institution has residency training programs for family medicine, general and orthopedics surgery, and anesthesia. Obstetrics and gynecology training was set to start in September 2023. Kijabe Hospital has been a recognized and certified training site for the Kenya Medical and Clinical Officers internship program since 1995.

Kijabe College of Health Sciences has been graduating nurses for 40 years and currently trains health care professionals across multiple levels. Its high-demand novel programs are aimed at filling key gaps in East Africa. These include Kenya Registered Community Health Nurse, Registered Clinical Officer, and advanced higher diploma programs in Kenya Registered Nurse Anaesthesia, Emergency Critical Care Clinical Officers, Pediatric Emergency Critical Care Clinical Officers, Palliative Care Nursing, Perioperative Nursing, and ICU Nursing.

Urology practice as an independent discipline did not exist before 2017. Patients with urological conditions and needs were treated by the general surgeons, referred to facilities in Nairobi, or piled up to be taken care of by visiting/expatriate urologists. In the year 2013, I decided to undertake formal urology training in order to provide the needed care for this group of patients. I had been in general surgery practice for 10 years prior, 6 of which I had spent at Kijabe Hospital. After completing the training in 2016, I started the urology unit in 2017 and in 2019, Jack, another general surgeon turned urologist, joined in. As of now we have urology clinics in Kijabe and Nairobi that review 80 to 100 patients per week; we have 4 operating days per week and do about/above 60 operations per month. These statistics are for adult urology. The pediatric surgery team takes care of all the pediatric urology cases. General surgery residents have mandatory rotations in urology both in their Member, College of Surgeons and Fellow, College of Surgeons years of the COSECSA (College of Surgeons of East, Central, and Southern Africa)/Pan-African Academy of Christian Surgeons programs. Urology training in the country is being offered by the University of Nairobi as a 5-year master’s program, and the alternative is to join other programs in universities outside Kenya or fellowships such as COSECSA or its equivalent, which are also outside Kenya. Kijabe Hospital stands a chance to offer urology training as a fellowship program for Kenyan and non-Kenyan doctors who desire to do so. The training background is ripe for such a program.