Health Center encourages students to study overseas

Medical student Neena Qasba spent most of last summer in Bolivia studying poor women’s use of small loans for essential health services. Cheryl Bilinski, an MD/MPH student, spent the summer in Haiti working on a prevention and treatment program for pregnant women and newborns with syphilis.

The two students represent the growing number of Health Center students who study abroad during their graduate school careers.

Both say the experience was an invaluable adjunct to their education, giving them an understanding of cultural issues in health care they might not see if they studied only in this country.

Qasba says she came to recognize that there are many cultural barriers to obtaining health care. She worked with women who had successfully used microfinance loans to build small businesses to support themselves and their families.

Because of their success with the business loans, they were eligible for small loans for health care services, but they didn’t use them very often.

“Barriers to obtaining care seemed related more to cultural attitudes, such as the lack of trust in doctors and low health care literacy or general knowledge about health care procedures,” says Qasba who is analyzing the data for a presentation during Medical/Dental Student Research Day in February.

Bilinski says her experience helped her understand the difficulty of implementing health care protocols in low-resource settings. A simple blood test can detect syphilis in newborns, but in a rural country where laboratories and supplies are scarce, a blood test is not such a simple procedure, she says.

Bilinski adds that her experiences in Haiti affirmed her interest in international health studies, and she hopes to return there to do additional public health research during her fourth year of medical school.

Judy Lewis, professor of community medicine and pediatrics and director of global health education, says the Health Center’s program to support foreign study by students has an emphasis on encouraging students to study in “low-resource settings, where they can experience what life is like for 80 percent of the world, as well as gain a sense of how it feels to be ‘the other.’ This type of immersion helps improve communication and other clinical skills for effective patient care in all settings.”