Reflections on the Global Health & Innovation Conference
By Liz Suh, MPH
Though sad to have missed the French Quarter Fest and the balmy, music-filled April evenings that can only be found in New Orleans, I packed my bags and headed to New Haven, CT to attend the 10th Annual Global Health & Innovation Conference (GHIC) at Yale University (April 13-14, 2013). The conference was hosted by Unite for Sight, a global non-profit aimed at eliminating preventable blindness, and this was my first time attending GHIC.
This year’s event welcomed over 300 speakers, including keynote speakers, Tina Rosenberg, a New York Times journalist, and Jeffery Sachs, director of Earth Institute at Columbia University. More than 2,200 participants from over 50 countries attended the conference this year to exchange ideas and best practices in order to improve public health and international development. In addition to traditional poster and oral sessions, GHIC also offered 14 “pitch sessions,” where non-profit startups shared their innovative ideas and projects with the opportunity for feedback, questions, and networking. There were eleven such sessions on Saturday, and three on Sunday.
Given my current area of study in Maternal Child Health in the Global Community Health & Behavioral Sciences Department at Tulane SPHTM, my interests lie in women’s reproductive health and the social determinants of health. I attended three pitch sessions, all related to women’s health, children’s health, and community-based projects. These “pitch sessions” were certainly the highlight of the conference. My favorite pitch was presented by Danielle Grace Warren, Founder and Executive Director of One Village Planet and JustShea. In just 2 years, her One Village Planet created a women’s shea collective in one village in Ghana to safely and sustainably harvest shea nuts. Snake bite morbidity is the greatest barrier for shea farmers, as it limits the quality, quantity and negotiating power of their harvest. One Village Planet provides women farmers with protective clothing, shea nut storage silos and microfinance loans. These components allow the women to send their children to school, to feed their families and to negotiate for greater gender rights. In the near future, JustShea will release a sustainable, fair-trade shea beauty product line that rakes in greater profit and female empowerment for these Ghanaian shea farmers. The collective aims to expand their membership, replicate their model in neighboring regions, and create their JustShea line in the near future.
I would also like to mention two notable presenters, whose progress I will be tracking over the next few years. The first is Dr. Laura Stachel, co-founder of WE CARE Solar. Dr. Stachel is an OB/GYN, and her husband is a solar energy specialist. Together, they created a way to bring light to clinics in resource-scarce settings through solar suitcases. These suitcases are currently used in delivery rooms and infectious disease wards in over 20 countries, and have saved over 20,000 lives.
The next is Dr. Sara Berkelhamer, neonatologist at Northwestern University, who presented on Helping Babies Breathe (HBB), a toolkit aimed at training traditional birth attendants and midwives to provide neonatal resuscitation in a low-literacy, low-resource setting. Already two papers have been published on the notable efficacy of HBB, including a site in Tanzania, whose results can be found in the past issue of Pediatrics (Msemo, 2013 http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/doi/10.1542/peds.2012-1795). So far 80,000 healthcare providers worldwide have been trained. HBB addresses the challenge of unacceptably high neonatal mortality rates in low and middle income countries, and is being used by many countries to meet the Millennium Development Goal #4 of reducing “under 5” mortality rate by two-thirds by 2013 (MDG4).
I return to New Orleans empowered and encouraged by witnessing the cadre of young, intelligent public health innovators whose fresh ideas are aggressively aimed at solving one puzzle piece of global health problem one [INSERT IDEA HERE] at a time. One student this weekend ended his PowerPoint presentation with a Bill Gates quote, “Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.” Leaving New Haven, I realize that this statement is highly likely in the field of global health and development. Being around leaders in my field inspires me to devote myself to evidence-based, culturally competent public health research in women’s health.
I am also deeply grateful for the quality education that I am receiving at Tulane University. After two years of training as a public health graduate student, I feel confident in examining epidemiological data with a critical eye, assessing the health burden of public health problems through a socioecological model, evaluating the limitations and biases of proposed project, and providing feedback on a presenter’s evaluation plans. Silly as it sounds, I can ask intelligent, productive questions in a roomful of 200 peers and future employers at a conference. One less thing that I have to worry about!
As after any conference, I feel refreshed and inspired to continue in my current research in women’s health; I, too, want to contribute to the evidence base of public health and social science research. I am reminded of a quote by T.S. Eliot, one of my favorite poets, “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end of where we start from.”As I am nearing the end of my MPH program, I am constantly wondering where my degree will take me five or ten years down the line. Though that is yet uncertain, I am returning from this conference humbled and inspired. Students and young professionals are tackling some of the world’s most pressing problems with the pluck and fearlessness of seasoned professionals. I consider my education at Tulane and conference opportunities such as these as launching pads for future research and career opportunities, both in public health and medicine, starting here in New Orleans.
Liz Suh completed her MPH, with a concentration in MCH, in May 2013. She is starting medical school this fall.
