Field Experience in the Shadow of Kilimanjaro.
In Kenya’s Southern Kajiado sub-county, where Mount Kilimanjaro dominates the horizon from across the border in Tanzania, health facilities face a range of challenges.
Like elephants.
“The clinic staff said that sometimes there would be large herds of elephants blocking the only road to the clinic” near the Amboseli National Park, says MPH student Chenzhe Cao. “You don’t want to be anywhere near these herds, so people sometimes physically cannot get to health facilities even if they need it desperately.”
Cao was one of 26 students who spent five weeks monitoring and evaluating the Community Health Worker Program of the Kenyan Ministry of Health’s Community Health Strategy as part of last summer’s Kenya Field Practicum in Public Health and Environment. Led by Global Health Assistant Professors William MacLeod and Jennifer Beard and alumna Sriya Srikrishnan (’15), the practicum was supported by Santander Universities Kenya Program Scholarship.
Some Kenyan facilities are successfully keeping records and providing healthcare in the region, Cao explains, but most of the facilities need more funding, training, and staff. Cao’s group focused on the Health Management Information System (HMIS) for the sub-county—a challenge when other factors are still lacking.
“You can’t have a system if you can’t run a facility, if you don’t have the power to run it, and no running water,” Cao says. “When they do have that, there are staffing issues.”
The researchers recommended the ministry hire formally trained records officers, adopt computer-based record systems (only 14.3 percent of the facilities had them), and increase operational budgets.
The practicum “allowed me to gain skills and gain insight into what it’s really like, especially in developing, low-resource settings, to incorporate technology,” Cao says. Other activities in the five weeks—attending a Maasai wedding, seeing those road-blocking elephants in the Amboseli National Park, and a visit from Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta—sweetened the deal.
“It’s one of those experiences where first you ask yourself, ‘What am I getting myself into?’” Cao adds, “but then you just get so much out of it.”
Information about the 2016 Field Practicum in Public Health and Environment will be available in December.