Student Helps Establish Maternal Health Monitoring Program in Haiti.

For her public health practicum, student Brittany Tusing worked with a child and maternal health service in Haiti that operates a mobile prenatal clinic that travels to 23 villages each month, serving about 700 women.

The mobile clinic, operating out of a bright pink custom built Jeep, is part of a spectrum of services offered by Midwives for Haiti, a Virginia-based nonprofit that works with Haiti’s Ministry of Health and other organizations to “deliver culturally appropriate, high impact health interventions.”

Tusing helped refine and strengthen the mobile clinic’s monitoring and evaluation capabilities. She was specifically tasked with developing a formal monitoring plan to ensure the quality of care being provided to clients during prenatal visits, postpartum care, and referrals and transfers.

She also helped set up the foundations of a structured evaluation plan so that the organization could assess its impact on maternal mortality in its operating area, the villages of Haiti’s Central Plateau. Working with the clinic’s six midwives, she created a new data collection sheet designed to assist the group’s ongoing collaboration with local and regional officials from the Ministry of Health.

A significant part of her funding came from a public health fellowship sponsored by Santander Universities, a division of one of the world’s largest banking firms. At SPH, the Santander Fellows Program provides about 45 annual stipends in three programs: for low- and moderate-income students, for students pursuing health care research in Latin America, and for a field practice program in Kenya. The practice opportunities are critical for SPH students, who are required to spend at least one semester on an intensive practicum to gain firsthand knowledge. Santander stipends often pay the bulk of airfare, ground transportation, and housing for the semester-long practicum.