Intense Training

For many people suffering from sickness and injury around the world, the challenge isn’t finding a cure for what ails them, it’s finding a way to deliver proven cures where they are needed.

“We know so much that could help so many,” said Rebecca Weintraub, faculty co-director of Harvard’s Global Health Delivery Project, “but making sure the right people have that knowledge and can implement it is critical to improving care.”

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This July, 62 mid-career global health professionals from 25 countries traveled to Harvard to participate in an intensive training designed to improve how care is delivered and how health organizations are managed around the world.

The Global Health Delivery Intensive is a key component of the Global Health Delivery Project, an interdisciplinary collaboration between Harvard Medical School, Harvard Business School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

The summer intensive convenes ministry leaders, health care providers, educators, researchers, and students in a program that sharpens their understanding of key concepts in global health delivery as they develop the skills necessary to implement effective programs to improve health in resource-poor settings.

Participants enroll in three courses at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health to learn how to understand epidemiology, manage programs and strengthen health delivery systems and structures.

The summer intensive is cosponsored by HMS and the Harvard Chan School, under the direction of Harvard faculty on the staff of Brigham and Women’s Hospital. During the summer intensive, students also utilize a platform of expert-led communities, GHDonline, to connect and collaborate with other health care implementers working to improve the delivery of health care.

Since 2009 the summer intensive has trained more than 300 practitioners.

This year’s cohort included:

• Carlos Faerron-Guzman, co-founder and director of the Interamerican Center for Global Health – CISG, and a collaborator, consultant and adjunct professor of multiple national and international academic institutions.
• Naufa Damda, co-creator of a medical startup, Scrubz, aiming to improve the quality of medical clothing, instruments and textbooks for health care professionals in the United Arab Emirates. Damda is a physical therapist born in India and raised in the UAE. Damba is one of 11 students in the program funded through the Harvard Medical School Center for Global Health Delivery–Dubai.
• Thierry Nyatanyi, head of the Division for Epidemic Surveillance and Response at the Rwanda Biomedical Center/Ministry of Health, implemented national efforts for preparedness and response to epidemic-prone diseases, coordinated the Rwanda-field epidemiology program and was Rwanda’s point person for international health regulations.
• Ruth Damuse Charles, associate professor of medicine at the National Medicine School of the State University of Haiti, worked with colleagues at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Partners in Health-Haiti, to launch a global oncology and palliative care program in Central Haiti.
• Olivia Muskett, Navajo Nation Community Health Representative and Community Health Environmental Research Specialist, and the training supervisor for the Community Outreach & Patient Empowerment Program (COPE).

Nine students enrolled in the HMS-MMSc program in Global Health Delivery enrolled in the summer intensive as a part of their core training.

The Global Health Intensive is directed by Joseph Rhatigan, associate professor of global health and social medicine and director of curriculum development for global health delivery training programs at HMS, and HMS associate professor of medicine and associate chair of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and by Rebecca Weintraub, who is also HMS assistant professor of global health and social medicine and assistant professor of medicine in the Brigham and Women’s Division of Global Health Equity.

The Global Health Delivery Project was launched by Jim Kim, current World Bank president, Paul Farmer, head of the HMS Department of Global Health and Social Medicine and Harvard Kolokotrones University Professor, and Michael Porter, the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at Harvard Business School.

Adapted from a Global Health Delivery Project news release.