As part of BAMM (Blog About Malaria Month)
I will be featuring brief interviews with my coworkers at Stop Malaria Project
(SMP) and Malaria Consortium (MC) in the Soroti office.
Note: SMP is implemented by MC, which
provides technical assistance to the project.
A: Where are you from?
B: I’m from
Soroti, in Arapai subcounty, Onyakai village.
A: What did you study?
B: I received a diploma in clinical medicine and community health from
Mbale School of Clinical Officers. Right now I’m studying for a bachelor of
science in health services management at Islamic University in Uganda in
Mbale. Afterwards, I will pursue a master’s
degree in health economics or public health.
If all goes well, I’d like to do it at Johns Hopkins University, or
study in London.
A: Where have you worked
before SMP/MC?
B: I was working as a clinician at Louis Memorial Medical Center in
Kampala. I was also working as a buffer
trainer for Malaria Consortium in a project called ICCM (integrated community
case management) which involves treatment of malaria, pneumonia, and diarrhea
at the household level implemented by VHTs (village health teams). Working those two jobs gave me a clear
understanding of the difference of health service delivery between the elites
and the rural poor.
A: Why did you want to
work for SMP/MC?
B: I have this enthusiasm to implement community based projects. I realized that I could be of use based on
the experience that I gained from working in a well-facilitated health
facility. Now during supervision, I see
myself trying to create an improvement in rural facilities. The job also brought me back home. Since the facility I was working in had patients
with health insurance, I began to think “is it possible for me to come up with
an insurance package for the rural poor?” Coming back to Soroti made it easy
for me to think how I can implement that, even though it’s still just an
idea. Slowly, I’m starting to see how I
can kick-start that project. The point
is to help people that are really poor.
I’m also involved with a chicken project to help generate income for
poor households.
A: What drew you to work
in public health?
B: As a clinician, I was seeing
people come with different illnesses to a facility. The fact that there is a possibility
to prevent a disease drew me to public health.
Why does someone have to wait until they are sick to come a
facility? We can attack malaria from all
fronts, from prevention to management. It’s
all connected. The fact that I can work
with communities and crowds also drew me in.
A: What do you like most
about your job?
B: I’m really involved deep inside the fight
against malaria. It helps me also move
to places, meet different people and study different aspects about human
beings.
A: What do you think is
the biggest challenge in malaria eradication?
B: The biggest challenge right now is the eradication of the mosquito itself.
We are now encouraging people to use barrier methods, like sleeping under nets. In our environment, it is almost impossible
to eradicate the mosquito with so many swamps, especially here in Teso, with
all the fingers of Kyogo Lake. You can’t
drain the swamps and a mosquito can fly over two kilometers. But we have gained a lot success in preventing
deaths from malaria.
A: What do you think could
be improved in the malaria eradication campaign?
B: I think we need to take curative measures nearer to the
communities. More research should be
done on sterilizing mosquitoes. If you
can’t do without the mosquitoes, at least stop it from carrying the parasite
and transmitting malaria. Introducing scaling up of ICCM should also be done. Drugs
should always be available and recruit enough health workers to treat children
with malaria. Drugs are useless in the facility if no one can dispense them.
A: After SMP ends, what
would you like to do?
B: I would like to work with health projects for about five years. But, if it doesn’t come my way, I will do
poultry or other business. Or I could
volunteer in rural health facilities as a clinician. And of course, I want to pursue my master’s.
A: Can
you share a memorable experience from working at SMP?
B: When I did clinical audits in Ngora hospital, we discovered they
didn’t have an emergency room in their OPD, or Outpatient Department. (Clinical
audits are a way for health professionals to be assessed through clinical performance. It involves setting standards, and the audits
compare the reality to the standards. It
identifies gaps that need to be addressed.)
So, for the first time, I saw
that the administrators took it seriously.
Before I left, they identified a room to be set up for the emergency
room. It impressed me that they took it
very seriously.
Stop Malaria Project Uganda is one of many organizations
that host a Peace Corps Volunteer in partnership with Stomping Out Malaria in Africa. The initiative mobilizes and connects over 3,000 Peace
Corps Volunteers in 23 countries in sub-Saharan Africa to work together to
eradicate malaria from the continent. To learn more, please visit: http://stompoutmalaria.org/.
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