Dr. Mary Ajak Dut

Dr. Mary Ajak Dut is a general practitioner with paediatric specialisation working at Juba Teaching Hospital in South Sudan. Her practice focuses on the health of children — a population that bears a disproportionate share of the disease burden in one of the world's youngest and most fragile nations. South Sudan has one of the highest rates of child mortality in the world, with malnutrition, malaria, neonatal sepsis, and vaccine-preventable diseases among the leading killers of children under five.

Over her 10 years of clinical practice, Dr. Dut has built her expertise precisely around these conditions. She manages children with severe acute malnutrition (SAM) — a life-threatening condition that in South Sudan is often compounded by concurrent malaria, respiratory infection, or diarrhoeal disease, making clinical management particularly complex. She runs immunisation clinics as part of the Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI), working to increase vaccination coverage in a population where many children remain unimmunised due to geographic barriers, insecurity, and supply chain failures.

As a female physician practising in Juba, Dr. Dut also serves as a trusted clinical figure for mothers who bring their children to hospital, often for the first time. Her ability to communicate in Dinka — the most widely spoken language among South Sudan's Dinka community, who form a large portion of Juba's population — enables her to establish rapport and explain diagnoses and treatment plans clearly. She works in collaboration with UNICEF's nutrition programme, WHO's child health activities, and MSF teams operating in and around Juba.

Dr. Dut completed her MBChB at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, following the educational pathway taken by many South Sudanese medical students due to the limited number of medical training institutions in South Sudan itself. At Makerere, she undertook clinical rotations across paediatrics, obstetrics, internal medicine, and surgery, with paediatrics emerging as her primary clinical interest given the immense child health burden she intended to address upon returning home.

After graduating, she completed additional paediatric clinical training at Mulago National Referral Hospital in Kampala — Uganda's largest public hospital and one of East Africa's major teaching centres — gaining structured supervised experience in paediatric inpatient management, neonatal care, and emergency paediatrics. She obtained a Certificate in Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) Management through a UNICEF and WHO protocol-based programme, which qualifies her to assess, classify, and treat SAM using ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) and inpatient therapeutic feeding protocols.

Dr. Dut returned to South Sudan in 2016 and has practised at Juba Teaching Hospital since, participating in WHO and UNICEF child health training updates and contributing to the hospital's paediatric ward clinical governance. She is a member of the South Sudan Medical Association and actively supports efforts to develop paediatric care standards for the country.

Dr. Dut's clinical expertise is centred on the management of childhood illnesses in a high-burden, low-resource setting. Her most frequent presentations include children with severe acute malnutrition, often presenting alongside malaria, pneumonia, or diarrhoeal disease — combinations that dramatically increase mortality risk and require careful, protocol-driven clinical management. She uses UNICEF and WHO guidelines adapted to South Sudan's resources, initiating RUTF-based outpatient therapy for moderate SAM and inpatient therapeutic feeding for severe cases with complications.

In the paediatric ward, she manages childhood malaria across all severity levels, administering parenteral artesunate for severe complicated malaria and supervising the transition to oral therapy. She diagnoses and manages neonatal sepsis — a leading cause of newborn death in South Sudan — and provides neonatal resuscitation support in the delivery room when required. She conducts diagnostic lumbar punctures to investigate meningitis in older children and manages community-acquired pneumonia with available antibiotics.

Dr. Dut is responsible for immunisation clinics where she administers vaccines under the EPI schedule, educates mothers on the importance of completing the vaccination course, and identifies and follows up children who have missed doses. She conducts growth monitoring and developmental surveillance, detecting children with growth faltering who require nutritional intervention before they develop acute malnutrition. She refers children requiring surgical or specialist care — such as suspected cardiac disease or orthopaedic conditions — to Juba Teaching Hospital's limited specialist services or advises on medical travel to Kampala or Nairobi.

Dr. Dut has not published peer-reviewed research, but she has participated in several data collection activities that have fed into published analyses of child health in South Sudan. She contributed clinical case data to a UNICEF South Sudan nutrition situation report that assessed SAM treatment outcomes in Juba's facility-based therapeutic feeding programme, and her facility's data contributed to WHO child mortality estimates for South Sudan.

She has also been engaged as a clinical informant for qualitative assessments of childhood vaccination uptake barriers conducted by implementing partners of the South Sudan Ministry of Health. Her practical understanding of why caregivers delay or refuse vaccination — including misconceptions, previous adverse reactions, and logistical barriers — has contributed to programme adaptations that improved coverage rates in Juba. Dr. Dut views this kind of implementation science contribution as a meaningful form of research impact even without formal publication.

Juba Teaching Hospital is not equipped for planned international paediatric care, but Dr. Dut provides urgent paediatric consultations for children of foreign nationals working in South Sudan — NGO staff, UN personnel, and embassy families — who require assessment for acute illness in a child. She is available for emergency paediatric consultations and communicates clearly in English.

For South Sudanese diaspora families visiting Juba with children, she offers paediatric health assessments including catch-up immunisation, nutrition screening, and management of acute illness. She advises on malaria prophylaxis and child health precautions relevant to South Sudan's disease environment for children arriving from regions where these conditions are not endemic. When a child's condition requires investigation or treatment not available at Juba Teaching Hospital, she provides clinical documentation to support medical evacuation or referral to Kampala or Nairobi.

Dr. Dut has not received formal institutional awards, but she is recognised within Juba Teaching Hospital as one of the paediatric ward's most dedicated clinicians. UNICEF South Sudan's nutrition programme has acknowledged her facility's SAM treatment outcomes as among the better-performing sites in Juba, reflecting in part the quality of clinical management she provides.

Her significance as a female physician practising paediatrics in South Sudan is acknowledged by the South Sudan Medical Association, which recognises that female doctors play a critical role in building health-seeking trust among mothers and caregivers. Dr. Dut is committed to remaining in South Sudan to contribute to the country's developing health system and serves as a role model for female medical students and junior doctors navigating careers in one of the world's most challenging healthcare environments.