Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Owing to an oversight, the names and affiliations of some of the contributing authors of this chapter were presented incorrectly. The same has been corrected throughout the book.

In the era of Sustainable Development Goals and record numbers of students seeking educational opportunities abroad, university global health partnerships are quickly becoming a mainstay. These partnerships can bring together researchers, students, and community members in ways that address education, research, and community health needs. There are compelling to having institutional partnerships so that individuals can collaborate to have a sustainable impact compared to working individually within institutions. A collective base of expertise may also leverage scarce resources and help to develop creative solutions to intractable issues. Frequently though, universities working together on these issues can reinforce existing disparities and unequal relationships that prioritize the flow of information, bodies, and agendas from higher to lower resourced parts of the globe. We take as a starting point that partnerships, if built, maintained, and managed in an equitable fashion have the potential to generate a lasting positive impact on global health.

This chapter describes our experiences in connecting a group of emerging Southern African scholars around the inherently interdisciplinary field of migration, urbanisation and health. South Africa, as with other countries in the region, is witnessing multiple simultaneous and interconnected transitions – health, demographic, social, economic and political. Defining, measuring and better understanding the dynamics and complexities of these transitions is a fundamental step in the professionalizing of next-generation scholars in the area of migration, urbanisation and health. In this chapter we discuss themes, definitions and the process of forming group discourse at the nexus of migration, urbanisation and health. Driven by substantive questions derived from studies of the lived experiences of urban migrants in South Africa, specifically the intertwining of migration trajectories and health histories, a central goal of our collaborative endeavour was ‘to connect the dots’ – key concepts, data, measures and methods – in order to identify common themes and research priorities that will facilitate the participation of next-generation scholars in developing innovative and new research agendas. We report on the themes that emerged from a 2015 workshop held at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg that brought together senior and early-career scholars to discuss ways of engaging with migration, urbanisation and health in the Southern African context. We close with a discussion of the opportunities and challenges for early-career scholars in this field, identifying next steps to develop and sustain in-country capacity to influence both research and public policy.

Global health education is expanding rapidly in terms of both demand and opportunities. While traditional models of international field work educational experiences have their merit, innovative models in both undergraduate and graduate health education are critical to meet student demands and support international partnerships. This chapter describes examples of undergraduate and graduate global health international educational program that employ bilateral approaches to facilitate increased engagement and communication between partners in the global north and the global south. The following chapter illustrates methods and models in global health education to foster dialogues and mutually beneficial partnerships. Due to the fast pace of globalization and development, countries situated in the global south need to build their public health workforce now more than ever. Bilateral dialogue offers opportunities in ownership and education for both partners, which strengthens partnerships and ultimately builds a more robust global public health workforce.

In 2016, a group of collaborators from South Africa, Germany, and the United States met to plan and execute an adaptation of the “Secret History” training method from the South African to the German context. The training focuses on building empathic and self-care skills with health care workers. The project was unique in that it is an example of a transfer of a training program from the Global South to the Global North. Regardless of the direction of transfer, the challenges of cultural adaptation remain. Consequently, this chapter includes a brief explanation of the “Secret History” training method, gives an overview of existing approaches for cultural adaptation of interventions, describes the steps involved in our adaptation process, and summarizes our results with a view to improving local acceptability and uptake.

This chapter discusses the current state of healthcare, challenges and potential local and cross-national solutions related to multiple morbidity in low and middle income countries and vulnerable populations in high income countries, based on interdisciplinary research of provider workload in South Africa and the Caribbean. With a high chronic and noncommunicable disease (NCD) and HIV burden in both settings, it is not uncommon to find patients having this double burden of disease. Additionally, patient resiliency is exacerbated by the multiplication of both demands made by the interactions from treatment modalities and multiple service providers. The Cumulative Complexity Model (CCM) posits that as the burden of disease and resulting workload increase, the patient capacity to respond to it diminishes. In middle and high-income countries, a dedicated system of care for people living with HIV/AIDS was developed in parallel to existing systems of care for NCDs, which has been successful in increasing advocacy, political will, and healthcare worker empowerment. We explore the application of this model across settings, along with other potential solutions.

Informal workers are a challenging group to work with, due to geographically dispersed locations, undocumented migrants, and other forms of vulnerability. We discuss the process through which we gained entry to work with informal workers in New York City. We work with “canners”, a population which collects recyclables and deposits them at a redemption center to collect cash refunds. Partnering with a nonprofit organization solves issues of group organization, but difficulties remain in building relationships with individuals. We used a combination of in-person meetings, an iterative and collaborative research design, and incentives to lay the groundwork for multi-method research with this group.

In 2016, a group of interdisciplinary collaborators from South Africa and Germany met to plan and execute a comprehensive review of the available data and literature on several topics of urban health in South Africa. These topics included environmental health, mental health, palliative care, and maternal and child health. The objective of the project was to understand the available data for urban health, which can inform academics, government, and non-governmental organizations about maternal, and child health in urban areas from a view of researchers in the study area and familiar to their environment as well as from an external view of researchers from different cultures and with different experiences.

This chapter focuses on the experiences related to maternal and child health; experiences for Although our exercise of collecting small scale urban health data was done to understand the situation in South Africa, it could be applied to any setting in a low, middle, or high-income country. It is clear that while maternal and child health data exist for urban settings, there is a need for the data to be better organized, standardized, more comprehensive, and be easy to use across disciplines. This situation is in no way unique to urban South Africa, in fact in many countries around the world data may not exist or may exist in an even more reduced form. However, the focus on South Africa provides a good understanding on what is and what could be about the most basic step of urban health informatics: structured/linked data.

The general direction of global health within academia seems to have moved to a stage where easily accessing information is vital to notions of transparency and interactions. The task of universities is to find and create pathways that inform society and our students about the realities of health across various nation states. While this might seem like a daunting task, the structure of Pan Institution Network for Global Health (PINGH) has provided avenues for exploring and addressing complex and interrelated health issues among global partners within an academic setting.

The most important role of a network is to remind us all that it takes a collective body to have a sustainable outcome and impact on population health. The Pan Institution Network for Global Health was formed with institutional support from the Pennsylvania State University in 2014. As the network and institutions evolve, it is important to examine its relevance and make adjustments to reflect changes that are likely to maximize and strengthen partnership. Some degree of professional mobilization is called for if a network is to achieve its goals and a level of health literacy is required for us all (donors and researchers alike) to appreciate and value the important of focusing at the intersections of conditions rather than focusing on the binaries that separate us.