Better Together

Indigenous communities, both in the U.S. and around the globe, face significant health disparities due to numerous factors including structural racism, poverty, historical forced assimilation, intergenerational trauma, and underfunding. Dr. Valerie Dobiesz, Director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative’s Front Line Indigenous Program (FLIP), joins Better Together to discuss academic and clinical partnerships and career pathway programs designed to address these disparities through workforce development and capacity building.

Funding for global health is a perpetual challenge. Given recent cuts in federal funding, many global health practitioners are considering what the future looks like to find support for global health work and for their own career development. Dr. Indi Trehan joins Better Together to share his journey, sharing pearls about mentorship, how to be effective in capacity-building and research, and creative paths for funding. He discusses nuances of different funders including motivations, agility, oversight, and alignment with advocacy efforts, and how current politics affect the global health funding landscape.

Clinical trials are a cornerstone of advancing medical knowledge, yet significant disparities remain in how research is conducted globally. Dr. Nitya Wadhwa, a pediatrician and physician–scientist, shares her journey from clinician to investigator. She joins Better Together to discuss the process of conducting multi-country clinical trials including design, getting ethical approvals, data collection, analysis, and dissemination. She shares best practices of harmonization, monitoring, and data safety that ensure high-quality rigorous scientific findings that will impact clinical care, leading to improved health outcomes for children and mothers in low-and middle-income countries.

Medical care in conflict settings is complicated by the destruction of infrastructure and displacement of populations. In this episode, Dr. John Kahler, co-founder of MedGlobal (a non-profit organization that provides medical services to displaced people and communities affected by war and disaster), discusses hurdles of financing, access to care, healthcare worker safety, and sustainability. Agility, utilizing local networks, and training of local providers have fostered MedGlobal’s success while the organization navigates challenges of scaling, bureaucracy, and a landscape of changing government political will and funding for international development.

Short term global health experiences for students, trainees, and even licensed health providers have often been plagued by ethical concerns, lack of sustainability, and harmful unintended consequences. Dr. Jessica Evert, a family medicine physician and Global Medical Director of Child Family Health International, joins Better Together to discuss best practices in ethical and sustainable global health experiences. Listen to hear about participation as a learner vs a service provider, taking an assets-based approach, fairtrade learning, and so much more!

“Glocal” health has been described as a transnational approach to improving healthcare in both “global” and “local” communities with a focus on community engagement, transferable knowledge and skills, bidirectional learning, and social justice. Dr. Stockton Mayer, an infectious disease physician at UIC, joins Better Together to talk about his work with partners and communities in Guatemala and Chicago and “adjusting the paradigm” of health care service delivery based on community needs.

Implementation science aims to link evidence-based interventions and policies to real-world practice, bridging the gap between research and actual health outcomes. Dr. Ramnath Subbaraman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine at the Tufts University School of Medicine. He joins Better Together to discuss his work in implementation science and “innovations hitting reality,” specifically in tuberculosis (TB) care in India to improve TB prevention, care, and survival.

Drs. David Gaus and Carlos Troya are both family physicians working with the Andean Health & Development non-profit organization that manages two hospital in rural Ecuador. They join Better Together to talk about challenges and best practices in working in rural healthcare, including the need for human resource training in the rural sector, public private partnerships to support sustainable rural healthcare delivery, and the strategic role of the rural hospital in primary healthcare delivery systems.

Dr. Gabriel Culbert is a PhD, RN, and Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Nursing. He joins Better Together to talk about his work in Chicago and Indonesia, where he has done clinical research to address the “perfect storm” of substance use disorder, HIV, and incarceration. He shares his experience exploring the intersection of social factors and medical illness, how we think about the word “vulnerable,” and getting out of your comfort zone.

Psychotherapist Marija Šarić is the Director of the psychosocial support services organization Wings of Hope. She has specialization in trauma psychology and has been working in Bosnian civil society to support vulnerable and war-impacted families since the early 1990s. She joins Better Together to share her experience in providing mental health treatment for those impacted by trauma.

Dr. Sarah Messmer is dual-boarded physician in internal medicine and pediatrics at the University of Illinois at Chicago who works with Physicians for Human Rights providing care for refugee patients and asylum seekers. She joins Better Together to discuss her work with asylum seekers and preparing affadavits, physician advocacy, and the importance of trauma-informed care.

Dr. Naina Bhalla is a dual-boarded internal medicine and pediatrics physician who has been working intermittently for Médecins Sans Frontières, also known as Doctors Without Borders, for more than a decade. She joins Better Together to talk about the rewards and challenges of working in the humanitarian service sector of global health along with strategies for working in resource-limited settings and balancing clinical work in the U.S. and internationally.

Dr. Shela Sridhar is a dual-boarded internal medicine and pediatrics physician at Brigham and Women’s and Boston Children’s Hospitals as well as a Clinical Instructor at Harvard Medical School. She joins "Better Together" to discuss her collaborative global health work in East Africa and her education of trainees using a teaching curriculum she developed called "decolonizing global health for equity." In this episode she stresses the importance of engaging stakeholders, building trust, checking your motivations, and assessing your impact, among other pearls for building a de-colonialist approach to working for global health equity.

Dr. Daniel Hryhorczuk, Professor Emeritus of the UIC School of Public Health and one of the founders of the UIC Center for Global Health, joins “Better Together” to discuss the intersection of his work in toxicology, environmental health, global, and planetary health, including decades of work in Ukraine. He discusses the tragedy of the human and environmental impact of the current war in Ukraine and a message of opportunity for activism in planetary health.

Dr. Gloria Rodriguez Vega, a critical care specialist and Chief of Critical Care at Hospitales HIMA-San Pablo in Puerto Rico, joins “Better Together” to talk about disaster management in global health, in particular regarding the natural disasters that hurricanes present in the Caribbean. She shares her experience while discussing the entire disaster cycle including mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery.

Collaborators Dr. Damiano Rondelli (Chief of Hematology/Oncology at UI Health and faculty at the UIC Center for Global Health) and Dr. Bishesh Poudyal (Professor of Hematology/Oncology at the Civil Service Hospital of Kathmandu in Nepal) join “Better Together” to discuss their work in building capacity for treatment of blood cancers. Together they have increased access to life-saving care and done collaborative research, and they discuss issues including program adaptations for local contexts, barriers to building capacity including politics and financing, and the importance of long-term partnerships and resilience. Dr. Rondelli leads the Global BMT (bone marrow transplant) Program which has helped build capacity in BMT not only in Nepal but also in Nigeria, Ukraine, Bolivia, and Uganda.

Dr. Supriya Mehta with the UIC School of Public Health joins “Better Together” to discuss her work as an epidemiologist doing global health research in Kenya focusing on sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and the vaginal microbiome. Dr. Mehta’s research is ultimately aimed at improving sexual and reproductive health in high-risk communities.