A. Project Title
Public Health Education and Training Program for Haitian Youth in Rural Haiti
B. Cross-Disciplinary Content
My concentration involves an amalgamation of academic disciplines including public health, preventative medicine, epidemiology, education, anthropology, sociology, infectious disease, international relations, public policy and private sector organizations.
The mission of my work is to mobilize communities in Haiti by empowering Haitians to take control over their own health. I am doing this by equipping them with the tools they need to save their own lives. My goals are to improve the health of rural Haitians and the death toll imposed on them by the constraints of poverty. These efforts are most important in rural Haiti where there are no doctors and where the people themselves are there own medical community. The goals are to educate Haitian youth to become leaders in their own communities as trained community health workers.
By teaching local volunteers information about a variety of issues including hygiene, sanitation, nutrition, and water quality, along with testing, treatment, and prevention strategies aimed at reducing the incidence of diseases common in the area, countless lives are being saved and communities of people are being empowered. I currently have 14 public health programs on these issues just short of celebrating their two-year anniversary.
Using several medical texts and drawing largely on the expertise of doctors both in and out of Haiti, I designed a 3-month public health training course to develop a working public health team of youth living in Les Cayes, Haiti. The program has since graduated 16 young adults. As community health workers, they help teach health education classes, perform mass treatment programs for scabies and ringworm, and administer TB and malaria medications using directly-observed therapy, among many other things. Aside from engaging the community in public health issues, and providing sustainable methods of treatment for hundreds of people, these youth have become leaders in their communities and looked upon with incredible respect. Their work is inspiring to their peers as can be seen in the long list of young adults waiting for their chance to join the public health group. My training program is the only one like it in the southwestern region of the country and has quickly become a model for health education in rural Haiti. Recognizing that prevention is by far the most cost-effective and sure way of eliminating the diseases endemic to this country and the unnecessary deaths that are the result, other health organizations in northern Haiti are beginning to adopt the my public health training program.
C. In-Depth Summer Experience
My project will involve two trips. The first will be from March 26-April 4 and the second will be from June 25-August 15.
My immediate goal for the public health program is to identify the parts that are adaptable to other regions in Haiti. The program I have already developed and the team that I have trained is specific to the southwestern region. While many aspects of the program may not need to be changed, Haiti is a diverse nation both in geography and population. For these reasons, a national approach to public health training would require a program that is easily modifiable and readily adaptable to any region of Haiti.
My short-term goals include continued fundraising and mobilization of the Brown community. To identify doctors, public health and medical students interested in working in Haiti as teaching staff for the public health training program. My long-term goals include identifying key partnerships with other organizations throughout Haiti, which can benefit from the strengths of the public health program, both in regards to the training and employment of community health workers.
During my March trip, I will be returning to Pwoje Espwa to evaluate the progress of the public health programs that I initiated 18 months ago and the management of these programs by the public health team. The goals of this trip will be to assess the success of the community health training program by evaluating the progress the public health team has made over the last six months since my departure from Haiti. I will do this by interviewing the public health team, children and staff at Pwoje Espwa and community members from local villages. While the focus of this trip will be on the training program and not the active public health programs (PHPs) themselves, the success of these programs will largely reflect the success of the public health team responsible for them. I will be looking to identify any of the PHPs that are not running smoothly and to determine their level of sustainability and what can be changed to improve them.
Over the next three months, I will be in contact with other organizations, clinics and doctors in Haiti in preparation of visiting them over the summer to assess their needs for public health education and the feasibility of adopting my model for public health training.
During the summer months, I will focus on editing lesson plans and brainstorming intervention methods to incorporate the training program into other settings. I will visit several pre-identified sites throughout Haiti and select one or two of them to become the next areas to incorporate a public health training program in their communities.
By focusing on the needs of specific populations, my project will prove more effective than a “cookie cutter” approach that assumes no change in different regions throughout the country. I will be bringing attention to the importance of community development through the education and empowerment of the youth within the community being reached.
The devastation brought on by the 2010 earthquake has rendered many of Haiti’s medical organizations, nonfunctioning. While the need for on the ground training in first aid and basic skills regarding preventative medicine have never been greater, it may prove to be difficult to locate organizations willing to adopt a new program into their already overwhelmed systems. For this reason, it is crucial to make sure the training program is as “user-friendly” and easy to implement as possible.
I’m striving to be more than just a physician. I want to be an advocate for human rights, a voice for those whose voice goes unheard and a face for the poorest of the poor. I don’t imagine myself in a hospital or in a lab. I’m interested in political medicine, changing policy, the way medicine is practiced, the way it is distributed, and how it is defined. I believe in a universal standard of care available to all. My goal after medical school is to join Cornell’s dual residency program that will allow me to spend every other month working in Haiti.
D. Timeline of Activities
During my second year of medical school, I plan to continue evaluating the public health teams that have been established in Les Cayes and the additional program(s) that were established in the summer of 2010 in a region other than Les Cayes.
I plan to take BIOL 3710 F Medical Spanish to help me to refine my Spanish skills considering all of the conversations that I have with Cuban doctors in Haiti and BIOL 3710 An Introduction to Tropical Medicine.
During year three, I plan to document the progress of the satellite public health training programs and draft a proposal for a nationwide public health education program that can be incorporated into the curriculum of schools, hospitals and clinics throughout the country, including and most importantly, outreach to those villages and communities in rural Haiti that lack access to schools and basic health care.
I plan to take
During year four, I plan to present the results of the training program to the Haitian minister of health, advocating for the formation of a national public health education and training program that would be under the auspices of the Haitian government.
Between my third and fourth years, I’m interested in taking the following clinical electives; Urgent Care, Tropical Medicine in East Africa, Public Health and Primary Care in Rural Honduras, Pediatrics in a Developing Country, and Internal Medicine in the Dominican Republic.
E. Final Scholarly Product
A collection of public health training manuals specific to at least two regions in Haiti including rural and urban areas.
