Training for second class of Global Health Corps under way at Stanford

- By Ruthann Richter

Courtesy of Global Health Corpsglobal health

Emily Bearse (right) and Jeffrey Misomali (center), both Global Health Corps fellows working together in Malawi, meet with one of the HIV-positive “expert clients,” whom they helped to train to do peer counseling about AIDS in their villages.

While working in Malawi, Emily Bearse met a pregnant woman who became distraught after learning she was HIV-positive. Bearse called in another woman, also HIV-positive, to share how she came to grips with the disease. Bearse and her co-workers had trained the peer counselor for just this kind of challenge.

“She sat with the woman for more than two hours, talking about what it means to have HIV — and that she could go on treatment and be healthy,” Bearse said in a telephone interview from her temporary home in Machinga in southern Malawi. “The woman came to accept her status.”

Not only that, she returned to the clinic a week later with her husband and two children so that they could be tested, too. The husband and one child both proved to be HIV-positive and received immediate treatment, as did the woman herself, Bearse said. All are doing well.

It is one of the many success stories to emerge from Bearse’s experience as a fellow in the Global Health Corps, which is wrapping up its first year and will begin its two-week orientation July 12 at Stanford for its 38 new fellows. About a dozen faculty will teach sessions on topics such as social justice, democracy and development in Africa, microfinance, urban poverty in America, cross-cultural awareness and the practical aspects of working as a team. The training is sponsored by Stanford’s Office of Global Health, Stanford Health Policy and the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies at Stanford. The Global Health Corps, jumpstarted by a $250,000 seed grant from Google.org, has raised almost $1.5 million for its programs through grants from corporations, foundations and individual donors.

The program, which grew out of a Google-sponsored conference on future AIDS leadership, aims to promote global health equity and provide much-needed opportunities for recent college graduates who are eager to work in the global health field. Program fellows, all age 30 or under, work in teams of two — one local fellow partnered with an international fellow — in underserved areas of the United States and Africa.

In the first year, the 22 fellows served a variety of needs, counseling homeless teenagers in New York City, improving access to health records in Tanzania, opening a district pharmacy in rural Rwanda and training hundreds of nurses in Newark, N.J., on how to improve patient communication, said Barbara Bush, 28, a founder of the program and daughter of the former president. The volunteers have worked with five partner organizations: the Clinton Health Access Initiative, Partners In Health, the Southern African Center for Infectious Disease Surveillance, the New Jersey-based Covenant House International and the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark.

“We have loved hearing stories from our fellows about their work and would characterize their impact as GHC fellows as a success,” Bush said of the first year.

The program, currently operating in Malawi, Rwanda, Tanzania, New Jersey and Boston, is doubling the number of fellows this year and moving into two new countries — Burundi and Uganda, said Jonny Dorsey, 25, a founder of the Stanford-grown FACE AIDS organization and a GHC co-founder. The new fellows will be working with several new partner organizations in Burundi, including the Village Health Works, founded by Burundian native Deogratias Niyizonkiza, profiled in the new book, Strength in What Remains. Other new partner groups include The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation.

“We want to keep growing and double the number of fellows in the year after to ultimately reach 500,” Dorsey said. “We want to say yes to young people who want to make this their career.”

Several alumni of the program are heading for graduate school to obtain advanced degrees in health, while others continue to work with nonprofits in the health field, Bush said. A few program graduates have been hired by the organizations where they were placed as fellows, she said.

Bearse, 24, who came to the program after finishing her master’s degree in public health at Boston University, said she hopes now to return to the United States to pursue a nursing degree and ultimately work in an underserved community, whether in this country or Africa.

During her year in Malawi, it was her job to help build a new Clinton Foundation program to increase access to HIV testing and treatment among pregnant women and their children. Malawi has a high rate of HIV, with an estimated 12 percent of adults infected, but women often shy away from HIV services out of fear and stigma, she said.

So Bearse and her GHC teammate, Malawi native Jeffrey Misomali, helped recruit and train a group of “expert clients,” or peer counselors, who could work with local women to help them understand the value of testing and treatment. They were able identify and train 50 expert clients, all HIV-positive women themselves, who are now working in 20 health centers in rural Malawi, she said. With these expert clients in place, more women and their children are taking advantage of available services.

“From the expert clients, I get nothing but continued determination,” Bearse said. “They want to make a difference. There may be some days when we run out of test kits or we’re out of medication. But then I see the enthusiasm of the expert clients. They may say, ‘We met with a woman today and she brought the whole family,’ or, ‘We went to the house of a client, and she’s going to get treatment.’ That is where I get my motivation.”

Another GHC fellow, Malawian native Richard Zule-Mbewe, 30, was placed out of his element at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark, where it was his job to help increase access to health services by improving health literacy. Sometimes people in this underserved area don’t come to the clinic simply because they can’t find it, or they get frustrated because they can’t read or understand the materials the caregivers have given them, he said. He and his GHC teammate Maggie Savage 22, a recent Duke University graduate, created a health literacy awareness task force at the hospital, worked with nursing staff to improve patient communication and helped develop better signage and other materials to help guide patients.

“Once patients have become proficient, at least they will be able to come for preventive services. They won’t wait for the situation to become bad before they come to the hospital or they won’t use emergency services,” Zule-Mbewe said. “We are trying to make patients able to ask questions and learn more about their health. At the end, we want patients to have better health outcomes and quality of life.”

About Stanford Medicine

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2023 ISSUE 3

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