Blog1 – Page 4 – Global Reproductive Health at Duke

Duke Students in Action

June 3, 2019June 3, 2019 by Molly PaleyNo Comments

This past year, I had the opportunity to work on a Bass Connections research team: Big Data for Reproductive Health (BD4RH). Bass Connections projects are interdisciplinary teams of undergraduate and graduate students, professors, and researchers. I became interested in reproductive health research after taking Dr. Megan Huchko’s global reproductive health course in the spring of 2017. It was through her course that I developed my understanding of and passion for reproductive health policy and gender equality. The BD4RH team reflected my passion for reproductive health through the project’s commitment to reduce contraceptive discontinuation rates. The initial goals of our research were to create and disseminate data visualization tools that use reproductive health data from USAID’s Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). The DHS collect data in over 80 different countries, and the surveys’ contraceptive calendar tracks women’s month-by-month contraceptive use over a five-year period. Our project began in the summer of 2018 when undergraduate student, Saumya Sao, and Masters student, Melanie Wai,...

Conflict Affects Women in Unique Ways

June 3, 2019June 3, 2019 by Stacey DixsonNo Comments

The Helper and the Witness Guest post by Kelly Hunter In 2018 the Nobel Peace Prize was shared by two very different individuals: Denis Mukwege, a 63-year-old Congolese doctor who founded the Panzi Hospital, and Nadia Murad, a 24-year-old Iraqi Yazidi human rights activist, who at age 19 was kidnapped by ISIS. What cause united these unique individuals from disparate parts of the globe? The Nobel committee recognized their advocacy for victims of wartime sexual violence, defined by scholars as “rape; sexual slavery and forced marriage; forced prostitution, pregnancy, and sterilization; sexual mutilation; and sexual torture” (Elizabeth Jean Wood, 2018). Dr. Mukwege has dedicated his career as a gynecologist to physically healing victims of conflict-related sexual violence in Africa and Ms. Murad, a survivor of such violence has founded an organization to raise funds and awareness to support other women brutalized by this increasingly common war crime/crime against humanity. The Nobel committee’s recognition reflects what scholars and international organizations have long realized:...

Expect the Unexpected

June 3, 2019 by Aarushi VenkatakrishnanNo Comments

As students and faculty start lifting their heads from the end of semester rush and head off to Summer adventures, we have a chance to reflect on all we have accomplished this past year and to celebrate our graduating students. I had the opportunity to think more about this as I prepared my remarks for DGHI's undergraduate commencement on May 10. The opportunity to speak to graduates and their families was one of the most meaningful experiences I’ve had since joining the Duke faculty in 2016. Asked to talk about my journey from Duke student to a career in medicine and global health, I told the students that they need to expect the unexpected, be prepared for— and maybe even proud of— the inevitable failures, and to take chances on new adventures and challenges. As we embark on new and exciting projects with learners across the university and medical school this summer, I am encouraged to see a new generation of researchers and...

How Marie Stopes Works to Promote Access to Reproductive Health Services

May 17, 2019May 17, 2019 by Faith OtewaNo Comments

I had the privilege to meet Rose Omia, the Regional Marketing Coordinator for Marie Stopes on March 27th, 2019. Marie Stopes is a non-governmental organization focused on sexual and reproductive health and provides contraception, safe abortion, and post-abortion services. The services are offered through a network of clinics and mobile outreach clinics to enhance accessibility to as many people as possible. Marie Stopes delivers services through its AMUA Clinics that offer high quality and affordable (subsidized prices) health services to women, young people, and communities’ regardless of anyone's ability to pay. In order to empower and promote the well-being of the adolescents (ages 15 -19), services are offered to them free 3 days a week. Through their network of mobile outreach clinics, Marie Stopes promotes freedom and choice by conducting monthly outreaches for 5 days in all the various counties they work. Many services such as permanent family planning methods like tubal ligation are offered by the mobile outreach team comprised of...

Kisumu Nurse Spotlight: Everline Oruko

April 30, 2019April 30, 2019 by Faith OtewaNo Comments

Everline Oruko is a nurse at Migosi sub-County Hospital, one of three sites in Kisumu, Kenya, that offers cervical cancer screening and treatment. As the Nursing Officer in Charge, Everline leads a team of nurses and staff to improve uptake of cervical cancer screening and cryotherapy treatment for those who test positive. Despite many fits and starts, Everline has remained a constant in the effort to reduce cervical cancer among women in Kisumu. Our Kisumu site coordinator, Faith Otewa, sat down with Everline to talk about her job and her commitment to her work in cervical cancer prevention: Everline was first employed by the Ministry of Health at Ahero Health Facility after she graduated in 1993 with a Diploma in Nursing. She further enrolled for certificate courses in Counseling and HIV Testing Services (HTS) because she felt these would make her service delivery better. Everline then became sponsored for a course in counseling supervision because of her commitment at work. Upon...

Introducing the New mSaada Mobile App for Community Health Volunteers

March 26, 2019March 27, 2019 by Stacey DixsonNo Comments

Guest Blog by Catie Grasse Meaning "help" in Swahili, the mobile "saada" application aims to improve the efficacy and efficiency of community health volunteers screening patients for cervical cancer in Kisumu, Kenya. This project is the extension of a previous project for the Duke class CS408: Delivering Software to Client, which pairs student developers and designers with a client team to build a specialized application. The mSaada developer team is composed of four Duke seniors: Our designer, Rachel Settle is a Computer Science major, Visual Media Studies minor, and pursuing the Information Science certificate. Working on the user experience is Carly Levi, a senior studying Computer Science and Global Health who is particularly interested in women's and reproductive health and hopes to use her background in technology to come up with effective interventions around the world. Focusing on the back-end database design is Catie Grasse, a senior majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Visual Media Studies. Also working on the...

Big Data for Reproductive Health Team Goes to DC!

March 26, 2019March 26, 2019 by Saumya SaoNo Comments

The Duke Big Data for Reproductive Health (bd4rh) team, part of the Center for Global Reproductive Health, is working on novel ways to visualize contraceptive calendar data collected by the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) program. The interdisciplinary group of researchers has created online, user-friendly tools to promote accessibility of this important but underutilized data. They aim to facilitate its use by researchers, program implementers and advocates. On Friday, March 22nd, team leaders Dr. Amy Finnegan and Kelly Hunter and undergraduate students Nicole Rapfogel, Celia Mizelle, Saumya Sao, Molly Paley, and Daisy Fang travelled to the DHS Program office in Rockville, Maryland to meet with key stakeholders who collect and use the contraceptive calendar data. They shared novel approaches to visualizing the calendar data: specifically, a chord diagram tool that allows users to see how contraceptive users flow from using one contraceptive method during a selected starting month to non-use (contraceptive discontinuation) or a different method (contraceptive switching). They also shared...

It’s a Jungle Out There!

March 26, 2019March 26, 2019 by Faith OtewaNo Comments

I was recently given the opportunity to attend DGHI's Regional Partners Workshop “Developing Collaborative Approaches to Global Mental Health and Maternal and Child Health Research" in Nairobi Kenya. The goal in convening this conference was well communicated in the opening remarks by Duke Global Health Institute Director, Dr. Chris Plowe. He told us that the workshop was to be a forum for partners to build skills, share knowledge, and identify new opportunities to work together. I looked around the room bursting with seasoned global health professionals, faculty, researchers, and doctors and couldn't help but think of myself as a “tiny animal in a big jungle" and wonder how well I would meet these goals. But after three days of consuming dense information from presentations and break-out sessions, I found that I had learned a lot in the big jungle, and that my experience was well worth sharing - especially with younger staffers who may be unsure of how to navigate the jungle...

Director’s Blog, Spring 2019

March 26, 2019 by Megan HuchkoNo Comments

On March 8, we celebrated International Women’s Day, which coincided with the one year anniversary of the Center’s launch in 2018. We took this opportunity to celebrate the activities and achievements of the past year with a tweetstorm celebrating the amazing women who have worked with the Center—from our team in the field, to the team of Duke undergraduates running our communications strategy, and a lot in between! Check out our twitter feed (@RHatDGHI) to keep up to date on all of students, faculty, residents and fellows who have contributed to the Center this year. This’s year’s IWD theme, “think equal, build smart and innovate change,” was a call to address the need for truly transformative solutions to advance gender equality and empowerment for women and girls. There is increased recognition that the growing gender divide in STEM fields will continue to hinder innovation and development of the disruptive solutions necessary to address disparities in reproductive health outcomes in the US...

Continuous Medical Education at Migosi Sub-County Hospital in Kisumu, Kenya

March 8, 2019March 8, 2019 by Faith OtewaNo Comments

Migosi Sub-County Hospital is a government level 4 hospital situated in Migosi sub-location of Kisumu County. The hospital is staffed with a Medical Officer Superintendent, Nursing Officer, Lab Technologists, Clinical Officers, Pharmacy Technologist, Support Staff, HTS Service Providers, Peer Counselors, and a Nutritionist. The facility has a catchment population of over 20,000 and is expected to provide services to over 5,000 women of reproductive age per year. Some of the services offered include Antenatal, MCH services, Anti-Retroviral Therapy, Family Planning, Home-based Care, Basic Emergency Obstetric Care, and Inpatient care. The Hospital has strengthened its cervical cancer department and has been in the forefront of beating cervical cancer. The department embraces a “see and treat” slogan and uses the Visual Inspection with Acetic (VIA) method and treatment by means of cryotherapy. The Hospital has intensively engaged Community Health Volunteers (CHVs) who take advantage of any chance to urge women to come for cervical cancer screening. On 14/02/2019 Dr. Phil Gorrindo visited the facility to...

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