{"id":9037,"date":"2012-06-22T14:51:00","date_gmt":"2012-06-22T18:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/insider\/recent-news\/program-design-competition-caps-intensive-two-week-class\/"},"modified":"2021-09-13T11:46:26","modified_gmt":"2021-09-13T15:46:26","slug":"program-design-competition-caps-intensive-two-week-class","status":"publish","type":"bu-article","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/news\/articles\/2012\/program-design-competition-caps-intensive-two-week-class\/","title":{"rendered":"William Gordon Program Design Award Competition Caps Intensive Two-Week Class"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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In IH744: Program Design for International Health<\/em> there’s no warm-up session, no gradual acceleration, no gentle slope before the plunge into action.<\/p>\n

IH744 is more of a log-flume ride into the real world of public health development, an immediate immersion into the Byzantine process of creating an international aid program from scratch. In the intensive two-week class, ideas are nurtured, fleshed out, scrapped and replaced with others, and eventually developed into a workable program plan that easily could be presented in a boardroom.<\/p>\n

Summer 2012 was just the third year for the course and its largest enrollment so far. This year, five teams of students competed for a $5,000 award from the William Gordon Foundation, a small non-governmental organization based in Maine, that will enable the winning team continue its program design and proposal development past the end of the semester.<\/p>\n

“I think it’s added a tremendous amount to the course, and I’d like to build on their support for this type of public health work and get other donors interested in supporting this kind of an effort,” said James Wolff, associate professor of international health, who co-taught the course with Monita Baba Djara.<\/p>\n

“It really has an amazing impact on the organizations in the field and the educational mission at BU — and on the students themselves,” Wolff said. “It provides students with an opportunity to have in the classroom an experience that’s meaningful and closely related to the work that they’re going to do when they get out of school.”<\/p>\n

The winning team — Emily Winter, Nancy Warren, Andrea Provost-Branchaud, and Matthew Banos \u2013- earned its honors with a strategic, comprehensive program<\/a> for the Family Life Association of Swaziland<\/a> to improve the sexual and reproductive health of the nation’s sex workers.<\/p>\n

The team dubbed the program Ungakwenta<\/a> \u2013 Swazi for “take charge!” \u2013 to reinforce the overarching goal of empowerment for Swaziland’s sex workers, nearly 70 percent of whom are HIV positive. The prevalence of HIV\/AIDS among Swaziland’s sex workers is considered a critical factor in the nation’s 26 percent HIV infection rate \u2013 the highest in the world.<\/p>\n

With a multi-faceted approach of peer-led education, mobile clinics, condom distribution, and targeted media campaigns, the Ungakwenta proposal hopes to spur multiple changes of behavior among sex workers and their clients.<\/p>\n

As one the of judges commented about all the proposals, “Just the sheer amount of information you have processed in two weeks is staggering.”<\/p>\n

One team partnered with Choice Humanitarian<\/a>, an NGO with operations in Kenya, Nepal, Bolivia, Guatemala and Mexico that seeks to reduce poverty and improve quality of life with small, village-centered programs. The Choice Humanitarian team<\/a> developed a three-year program for medical waste disposal in Nepal that would use on-site incinerators powered by sustainable fuel sources.<\/p>\n

Another planned project was crafted with the Swaziland-Baylor Teen Club<\/a>, a program initiated by the Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative<\/a> in Swaziland. The Teen Club team envisioned an expansion of current Teen Club programming<\/a> with young-adult mentors, support staffing increased education, counseling and better access for children in need.<\/p>\n

A team partnered with the St. Boniface Haiti Foundation<\/a> to expand outreach and build capacity of a current program against multiple-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), the second-leading cause of death in Haiti. The team’s proposal<\/a> targeted the Fond-du-Blancs region of Haiti, an area of about 200,000 people, with an ambitious program that included a new hospital building and more health-care workers to improve diagnosis and treatment of MDR-TB.<\/p>\n

Haiti was also the focus of a team allied with the group Physicians for Haiti<\/a> to develop “Pajate Sante”<\/a> \u2013 Creole for “Sharing Health” — a program to boost professional development and retention of physicians and nurses in Haiti. The team outlined a broad array of collaborative learning, leadership training, and management-skills building with the goal of better hospital-based care and improved outcomes for patients.<\/p>\n

The panel of judges included Demet Gural of Pathfinder International; Ronald O’Connor of Management Sciences for Health; Penelope Riseborough of John Snow, Inc.\/World Education; and Steve Solter of MSH.<\/p>\n

Immediate feedback and high-level dissection of the proposals is a definite benefit of the competitive course structure. The Choice Humanitarian team was queried about why it didn’t chose something more fundamental, such as access to clean water, and whether the program itself would be sustainable after the initial three years.<\/p>\n

Jon Simon, professor and chair of international health, asked Choice team members whether they had considered how their program would affect the poorest of the poor: the waste pickers who sift through trash to collect reusable items. It was a gentle, yet effective, reminder of the need to consider those not at the table when crafting any proposal.<\/p>\n

Said Wolff, “I was just blown away by how professional and complete these proposals were. I think every one of them is fundable. The idea now is for the organizations to tweak the proposals and since they’ve already identified some donor research, the next step is for the organizations to shop these proposals around.”<\/p>\n

Submitted by Michael Saunders msaunder@bu.edu<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In IH744: Program Design for International Health there’s no warm-up session, no gradual acceleration, no gentle slope before the plunge into action. IH744 is more of a log-flume ride into the real world of public health development, an immediate immersion into the Byzantine process of creating an international aid program from scratch. In the intensive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4833,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"bu_prepress_billboard":"","_bu_prepress_primary_term":"","_bu_prepress_primary_term_manual":""},"tags":[],"bu-publication":[3516],"sphnews-article-category":[3544],"sphnews-topic":[],"bu_edition":[],"media_type":[],"profile_tax":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/9037"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/bu-article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4833"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9037"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/9037\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":201012,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/9037\/revisions\/201012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9037"},{"taxonomy":"bu-publication","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-publication?post=9037"},{"taxonomy":"sphnews-article-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sphnews-article-category?post=9037"},{"taxonomy":"sphnews-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sphnews-topic?post=9037"},{"taxonomy":"bu_edition","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu_edition?post=9037"},{"taxonomy":"media_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media_type?post=9037"},{"taxonomy":"profile_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sph\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile_tax?post=9037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}