A Life's Journey in Public Health

A Life's Journey in Public Health 

I first became interested in public health when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) in a rural town in South Korea in the early 1970s.  Korea was a relatively poor and undeveloped country then.   I was assigned as a middle school English teacher.  Another PCV in my area was assigned to a rural health clinic.  We talked a lot about the treatment of TB and leprosy patients. I was particularly interested in the TB program. As a PCV, I visited remote villages where the elders suffered from TB. Skinny old men in tee shirts sat on the porches of their mud-walled huts wasting away from TB. Each cough spewed infectious bacilli into the air. Our Peace Corps health program was designed to ensure that patients were regularly taking their TB medicines, instead of discontinuing when they started “to feel fine”. The combination of rural sociology, primary health care and cross-cultural dynamics fascinated me.

In 1977-78, I attended the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont. One of the requirements for the Masters in International Administration was a six-month internship.  I was sent by Catholic Relief Services (CRS) to Semarang, Indonesia where I opened and operated a field office to supervise USAID programs in East and Central Java.  We implemented a Maternal Child Health Project that included infant care, growth monitoring, mothers’ education and supplementary feeding.   I managed all aspects of the program, including the administrative aspects, as well as the compliance monitoring. My key concern was to ensure successful outcomes from the program – healthy, normal weight babies and knowledgeable mothers.    This program, which intervened in children’s health at an early age, provided a robust economic return over the lifetime of the individual.  I thought it also provided an excellent return on the US investment.

    

After a year in Indonesia, I was transferred to Manila, the Philippines where I supervised a nation-wide nutrition program.  I travelled the whole archipelago, visiting MCH centers, leper colonies, and school feeding programs.  I realized that extreme poverty was at the root of many problems and that health interventions were not enough to improve the lives of the rural poor.  Investments in water supply and sanitation, and in basic education, supported by strong institutions and pro-poor policies are equally important.

         

While working in the Asian Development Bank, I was able to use my experience as the manager of a social sector division that designed and implemented health, and education projects throughout Asia.  We refocused our agency’s health sector strategy from investing in urban, tertiary care to one focusing on primary care.  (We faced an interesting challenge trying to convince our “authorities” that investments in primary health have strong economic returns). My colleagues and I devised health sector strategies for each country with an interest in borrowing for health projects. I worked on a range of projects to strengthen national health care systems, including HIIV/AIDS interventions that focused on ethnic minority populations living in the border regions of the Mekong Sub-region, and primary health projects that promoted “contracting out” of services to non-government agencies.   During the 1997 financial crisis in Thailand, we developed a policy-based project designed to protect the central government’s budget for HIV/AIDS and promote gradual decentralization of government hospital administration.   

I took home several lessons from my work at ADB.   To improve health outcomes, the entire health delivery system must be strengthened.  This includes building physical assets to provide access, but also designing effective management systems, training and motivating personnel, and addressing demand-constraints.  One simple example - a women’s clinic in Vietnam had no waiting room to provide clients shelter and privacy while waiting for their consultations. Women had to wait in the hot sun in front of the clinics, exposed to the entire community.  Improving privacy by installing a comfortable waiting room was an easy way to convince women to optimize use of the clinic. I also came to the conclusion that the health sectors in developing countries were highly fragmented, with a plethora of international donors and non-government organizations supporting too many small, vertical projects rather than systemic strengthening of  health sector institutions, which are often among the weakest of national institutions.  The leadership ranks in many developing countries are also very thin, making training an important component of capacity building. 

I moved to North Carolina in 2007 and began working with the Executive Service Corps of the Greater Triangle. I have been assigned to several projects to strengthen the operations of health-sector non-profits.  Recently, I have been working with community health centers that provide low-cost services to underserved populations. I was surprised to find that these agencies face similar problems to those in the developing world.  I also learned that health disparities in North Carolina are not too different from those in the developing world – poor and marginalized peoples face a disproportionate burden of poor health. Mental health services are underfunded and community health centers are burdened by bureaucracy.  Families in North Carolina have been steadily losing their health insurance as jobs in traditional sectors have been disappearing. Effective interventions have to be designed to overcome these disparities.  Like the clinic in Vietnam, providing the uninsured with accessible, quality services will likely increase their use of the facilities.

During September to December 2010, I had a professional opportunity to assist a free clinic in Moore County, NC to prepare a plan to become a federally qualified health center.  I was excited to use my experience and new knowledge from the UNC Gillings School of Public Health to analyze the health issues in the county, the strengths and weaknesses of the clinic, county demographics, and economic trends in preparing the project.   I am hoping the clinic will be selected for federal funding as this will allow an expansion from about 900 to about 4,000 patients.

These days I have been working with the Gillings School of Global Public Health to design a new global health issues program, undertaking a systematic review of quality improvement interventions focusing on maternal mortality and thinking about a monitoring and evaluation program for a mental health program in Madhya Pradesh, India.   

  

.... Ed