Bridging the gap
In the first year of the two-year program, students take classes at HMS and across Harvard University, with an emphasis on producing research that bridges the gap between biological and social sciences, and on courses that involve program design and strategies for leading change. Within the second year of the particular program college students conduct a mentored research project in the field.
The goal of the program is to train new scholars, Mukherjee said, empowering them with the ability to create new knowledge about how best to tackle real-world problems within health care delivery.
Students often conduct their research in a community where they already have established roots and relationships, with the concrete goal associated with using their new knowledge to solve a problem that the community identifies as a particular need.
Thanks to the particular program, Mukherjee said, there’s a growing global workforce of frontline caregivers, administrators, plus leaders who now possess crucial skills that will help them study, style, and analyze health systems that can deliver equitable health outcomes.
Over the past 10 years, 125 students from 38 countries have matriculated into the program in order to learn what faculty leaders describe as a “new science of worldwide health delivery. ”
Today, 89 MMSc-GHD alumni work to alleviate human suffering in 30 countries, within some of the most challenging medical, social, and economic circumstances in the particular world. Students and alumni of the program possess contributed to 149 peer-reviewed publications, many as 1st and senior authors.
Program alumni also work in leadership positions in overseas ministries associated with health plus in large international development and wellness care nongovernmental organizations, where they are well positioned to make significant changes in the way global health care is delivered, program leaders stated.
Still other learners and grads are using the work through their mentored research projects as a launching pad for their own smaller, independent health treatment organizations, founded on the particular principles of social medicine, collaboration, and equity.
The system collects numerous alumni stories and regularly invites alumni to share their own experiences within the plan and their particular accomplishments after graduation. These alumni talks have covered a wide range associated with topics from new techniques to treat diseases like tuberculosis, in order to approaches to improving wellness systems at the country level in order to addressing the effects of climate change in the South Pacific. The MMSc-GHD alumni panels in 2022-2023 are an extension of these events to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the program’s launch.
Just as this alumni work will be spread around the world, it is also spread across the spectrum of health care shipping. Projects range from alumni building maternal wellness clinics that include both safe delivery services and mental health support for mothers to function providing palliative and end-of-life care for cancer patients.
Jafet Arrieta, the physician through Mexico that earned her MMSc-GHD in 2015 — who also has a doctoral degree in public health from the Harvard T. H. Chan School associated with Public Wellness — is currently senior director and improvement advisor at the Institute with regard to Healthcare Improvement, an organization focused on improving health care worldwide.
At a recent panel discussion, Arrieta highlighted the importance of training multidisciplinary thinkers able to speak the particular languages of medicine plus public health and the languages associated with economics, history, and politics.
“In order in order to effect modify at a large scale, we need to be able to hold hands with our patients, visit all of them in their homes, accompany them within their communities, ” Arrieta said. “And we furthermore need in order to be able to sit in the table with senators, with ministers of wellness, with presidents. ”
By studying within the MMSc-GHD program, students learn about the importance of viewing problems through the particular eyes of patients, how to develop programs to address those issues, and exactly how to lead the charge to improve healthcare delivery. MMSc-GHD alumni apply that will knowledge to improve medical care in diverse settings across the globe every day.