Category: Zambia

Global Women’s Health from Home

Posted on by nayavill

On the backend of my internship, I can now look back with an awareness of how much the projects I am working on have evolved since the beginning. I cannot believe that we are reaching the end of the practicum this week, it has flown by. I am truly grateful for the team I have been able to work with throughout this experience. It has been so helpful for my future career planning to interact with others in the field of global women’s health.

Work from Home Set-up

In the second half of the internship, I have spent the bulk of my time working on the division of Global Women’s Health website content and restructuring to convey the current research to wide audiences. I have particularly focused on producing written content for the page detailing the prevention of adverse birth outcomes. At first it was overwhelming to effectively summarize the work of so many different projects in various countries. But as I continued, I found greater focus and clarity as I emphasized the population impact that these projects carried. This reflective reminder came at an important time for me. I was feeling burdened down by the extensive complex problems, especially on a global scale (as that was the context I was working in). I was doubting the change I could affect on systematic and widespread issues. However, as I drafted material about the big picture, the why, and the goals of the division, it reemphasized to me the importance of individual contributions as a piece of the united effort.

Nightly walks at Lake Crabtree

As I conclude this internship I am grateful for the glimpse it gave me into the responsibilities of program managers, with an emphasis in communications. It was informative for me to see how a team of researchers, local and abroad interact to complete translational research for improved practice. This internship taught me the importance of not only performing research but also telling the story to a larger audience: funders, potential fellows, and the general public. I gained an understanding of the value in uniting teams towards a common vision while each person is focused on a unique aspect of the overall mission. I hope to transfer these skills into positions I will hold in the future.

-Renee

Maybe it’s nearing the end or maybe it’s just the beginning

Posted on by nayavill

When I started this practicum in the middle of May, I had originally planned for this coming week to be my last week. I recently decided, along with my team, to extend the end date since the really interesting part is just beginning. Although the past couple of weeks have been filled with data cleaning, I am finally ready to begin the analyses we proposed as the basis of my practicum. We are using data from a household survey and combining it with data from health facilities across Zambia in order to gain a more holistic understanding of the services, equipment, and patient satisfaction with the country’s health care system. To our knowledge, this comprehensive picture of health facilities and services has not been examined before; prior research has focused on either just the health facility capacity/readiness or just the consumer experience.

Although I will likely have more final thoughts in the coming weeks, I am grateful to have been a part of this project and team. At the start of the practicum, I learned about antenatal care/nutrition recommendations and health facility quality measures, as well as gained a better understanding of the amount of work and careful organization required to select the variables of interest. These variables are the basis for our exploratory analyses and due to the nature of real-life data, have provided me with an opportunity to learn about and practice more advanced statistical methods. Our ultimate goal is to run a series of statistical models to better understand client satisfaction with antenatal care as well as growth, monitoring and promotion services. We will then publish a paper to share our findings.

Perhaps the greatest lesson I’ve learned from this practicum is the value of “thinking outside the box.” Doing so has helped my preceptor, Dr. Stephanie Martin, and I, organize our thoughts about which variables to use and how to carry out the analyses, it helped us overcome some issues with a messy dataset and methodological concerns (e.g. missing values, yes/no questions, issues merging datasets, lots of interesting variables to explore, etc.), and it prompted our research questions. Although I am nearing the end of my practicum, I also feel as though it is just the beginning. I look forward to digging further into the data to see what sorts of discoveries can be made, and using those to circle back to the big picture of reducing childhood stunting and understanding health care satisfaction and quality in Zambia. I hope our findings will not only be informative and worthwhile to the Zambian government and USAID, but will help others conducting similar research.

– Liana

Key Lessons

Posted on by nayavill

Like many others who have contributed to this blog, my practicum experience has been fundamentally altered by the pandemic. It’s been great to read about others’ experiences and know that the separation from the communities we’re working with has affected everyone. For me, that community is nearly 8,000 miles away – in Lusaka, Zambia.

A little bit of background on my practicum: Zambia has one comprehensive cancer center, the Cancer Diseases Hospital (CDH), which serves the country’s population of over 17 million people. Since 2006, when the CDH was established, they have treated over 20,000 new cancer cases. The most common cancers seen at the CDH are cervical, breast, and prostate cancers. In recent years, in an effort to better understand determinants and outcomes of these cancers, doctors and researchers at CDH have prioritized data collection and exploration. They’ve developed a retrospective-prospective database to capture data on the cases of breast and cervical cancer at CDH. As part of my practicum, I am helping one of the data teams with data cleaning and validation, and conducting some research using the information in the database.

The distance to Lusaka fortunately hasn’t prevented me from being able to develop and practice data management skills. In my practicum search, I knew I wanted to get experience working with data, and the work I’ve been able to do this summer has been incredible for giving me opportunities to expand on concepts and techniques we’ve learned across in our first two semesters of coursework.

But the distance has also created challenges – divorcing the content of my work from the community I am meant to be working in. Our instructors at Gillings this past year have repeatedly emphasized that humans aren’t data points. A person’s story cannot be fully understood when it is distilled into a series of responses across a set of variables. But the separation from Zambia has left me feeling the absence of community interaction and the context of the of the data I work with day-to-day. I’d love to have been able to be safely face-to-face with researchers, co-workers, and patients at the CDH.

Other posts on this blog have wisely extoled the power of gratitude and searching for silver linings during these unconventional times. And I have a lot to be thankful for! I’m glad I’ve gotten to spend (virtual) time with the CDH data team over Zoom, learning snippets here and there about them – their academic and career interests, their thoughts about certain health topics, what sports they follow. Being remote also means that I’ve been able to see my family and friends and get to know Chapel Hill/Carrboro better! And, finally, this experience has instilled in me a key lesson I intend to carry throughout my career: some public health work can be done extremely effectively remotely, but the quality and value of this work can always be made better through connection with the community.

– Emma