Universities and Global Health: Key Themes and Challenges

From March 14–16, I attended the Consortium of Universities for Global Health’s annual conference in Washington, DC. Here are some of the key themes and messages I gleaned from the various speakers and participants:

• Universal health coverage was consistently mentioned throughout the conference. Noncommunicable diseases, mental health, women and girls, and community health workers were also discussed frequently.

• Concerns on the horizon focused on how complex issues like climate change, human rights, and increasingly limited resources (e.g., the US Government’s budget sequester) affect the health sector.

• Optimizing knowledge—gaps in, access to, and translation into action—continues to be a challenge in global health. The minister of health of Rwanda urged the primarily academic audience to publish in open-access journals to expand developing countries’ access to knowledge—a wake-up call for researchers, donors, and implementers alike.

I was interested to see that although many of the universities represented at the conference were involved in initiatives to strengthen health professional education in other countries, there was no plenary devoted to how health professional education is affected by and in turn affects other aspects of the health workforce, such as the existence of national training and licensure databases or the absorption of graduates into the workforce. There was a breakout session on PEPFAR’s Medical Education Partnership Initiative and Nursing Education Partnership Initiative, which CapacityPlus supports, but perhaps future conferences can do more to catalyze discussion on the bridge between education and the workforce.

CapacityPlus and lead partner IntraHealth International were both active in the conference. IntraHealth’s President and CEO Pape Gaye spoke on a panel on US involvement in global health and coined the term “pilotitis” to describe the seemingly ubiquitous and heretofore informally diagnosed phenomenon of pilot projects being implemented without scale-up or sustainability. I presented a poster on interventions that educational institutions can implement to eliminate sexual harassment and pregnancy and caregiver discrimination. (See the related technical brief and summary report for more information.)

Related items:

• Transforming Health Worker Education: Implementing Options to Eliminate Gender Discrimination

• New Publication Spotlight: Strengthening the Health Worker Pipeline through Gender-Transformative Strategies

• Hitting the (Super) Target: Shopping for Tools for Health System Success

Photo courtesy of Crystal Ng