Several of our MCH students attended the 2021 American Public Health Association (APHA) conference, October 24-27, in-person or online. What follows is a post from one of the attendees.
By Bryn Prieto
As a first semester graduate student and first-time attendee at APHA, I was expecting my experience to be as hindered by the pandemic as the rest of my life has been. Fortunately, I found that the scope of projects, the countries of focus, and the institutions that researchers hailed from brought to life the global focus of our work in public health and how much there is to learn from one another, regardless of the distance.
Like many US-born folks, I’ve spent the majority of my life being taught health and medicine from a US-centric lens. This conference brought about the opportunity to connect our learning to efforts across the globe, often with an emphasis we rarely see at home. I was lucky enough to reconnect with my pre-pandemic work as a Peace Corps volunteer in Guatemala through a project on treatments in midwife-attended home births in the Western Highlands. I was especially happy to see this project aim to empower midwives and the work they do rather than replace their practices with something else. In my experience in Guatemala, midwives were often disrespected and ignored despite the importance they hold in childbirth and child rearing in the highlands. The efforts to prevent postpartum hemorrhage were hindered previously by stigma towards community health workers and midwives, and I was happy to see this project embrace their impact and place in Guatemalan culture by working with them to prevent poor outcomes, rather than attempt to replace them.
APHA offered the opportunity for me to reconnect with past work, and expand my horizons for future research projects. I was able to apply my learnings in epidemiology, better understand my design research class, and recognize key aspects of public health. The chance to connect my work in the Peace Corps within a new context and information from graduate school reminded me that there is still much to learn, and I’m looking forward to whatever that may be at next year’s conference.
Bryn Prieto is a first year MPH graduate student in Maternal and Child Health. She is particularly interested in prenatal practices and care, reproductive epidemiology, and health equity. She loves to read, watch soccer, and travel in her free time.
