From the Field – Page 3 – Global Reproductive Health at Duke

Reflection From the Field: Dr. Emily Herfel’s Reflections in Kisumu

July 21, 2022December 10, 2024 by Emily HerfelNo Comments

It is hard to believe I have called Kisumu home for almost a year, with time cut short by the elections set for early August. Our team is busy, skillfully orchestrating multiple studies concurrently. The stigma education study, looking at the impact of a stigma-responsive educational video on cervical cancer screening behavior, is in full swing. The six health facility sites are offering research-supported HPV self-testing as part of their cervical cancer screening program, led by community healthcare volunteers (CHVs). Our three intervention sites are also showing the HPV stigma-responsive education video. The team then visits each site once a week to ask women to participate in a validated HPV/cervical cancer stigma measurement tool. Jeniffer, our study clinician, is leading the project with grace, balancing the day-to-day activities with each facility. Getting positive feedback from the CHVs and women of the community about a cervical cancer screening technique that avoids a speculum helps to keep us motivated. Some of the sites are...

Reflection From the Field: SRT Student, Laya’s, Reflections in Kisumu

July 18, 2022December 10, 2024 by Laya SathyanNo Comments

As we start our eighth and final week in Kisumu, the SRT team is finishing up the last stages of our on-the-ground research, and preparing for our trip back to the US! At this point in time, we are almost finished with our clinic observations. Despite several scheduling changes, we will complete our project with five to six observation sessions at each of the six clinics. Additionally, we have set in motion the plans for the Kisumu team to conduct focus group discussions (FGDs) at the intervention clinics after we leave. The purpose of the FGDs is to understand women’s opinions about our educational intervention, and how they feel about incorporating peer navigation services into the clinics. Unfortunately, we will not be here to witness the FGDs as we originally anticipated, but we’ve been working on setting everything up so that they will run smoothly in our absence. That includes getting participant recruitment up and running, going over our questions and...

Reflection From the Field: SRT Student, Bentley’s, Reflections in Kisumu

June 30, 2022December 10, 2024 by Bentley ChoiNo Comments

First and foremost, we have passed the halfway point of our time in Kenya! Time flies by, and we are discussing what we want to get out of the next four weeks. Insofar, we collected more than 20 observation data to evaluate the workflow of stigma education at the clinic. During this process, we faced multiple hiccups, especially scheduling a visit and clearing up logistics. Three of our observation clinics had a twelve-day-long CHV training, so we had to flip our schedule to ensure we could collect the data we initially planned. We spent the last couple of days creating a contingency plan so that our time in Kenya could contribute to the depth of our data. Listening to what other teammates thought helped us, as a team, solidify the future direction of our study, such as what variables to analyze in observation studies, codes for focus group discussion, and the focus of our manuscript. Besides working on an observational study,...

Reflection From the Field: SRT Student, Haley’s, Reflections in Kisumu

June 15, 2022December 10, 2024 by Haley DionNo Comments

We have made it through week three of our time in Kisumu, Kenya! The weeks are truly flying by because our research is progressing, and we are enjoying our time in the city. The other SRT students and I officially started our workflow analysis observations at each of the six clinics this past week. There are three intervention clinics, at which community health volunteers (CHVs) display an educational video about human-papillomavirus (HPV) self-screening, and three control clinics, where CHVs provide health education talks about HPV and offer the self-screening. Through our observations so far, it is clear that all the CHVs are quick learning, adaptable, and passionate about increasing HPV screening for women in Kisumu! We have enjoyed our first week of observations because of all the positive aspects we have seen with our study. Fortunately, many women are opting into HPV self-screening, and we are able to increase prevention of cervical cancer in many of the Kisumu sub-counties! We...

Reflection From the Field: SRT Student, Michelle’s, Reflections in Kisumu

June 5, 2022December 10, 2024 by Michelle HuangNo Comments

Sunday marked the first full week that the rest of the students from the Kenyan Reproductive Health SRT team and I have been in Kisumu, Kenya. Our experience thus far has been full of introductions and familiarizations, and we have had an exciting time learning from the field while finding our footing in a new area. After we flew into Kisumu, we were able to get situated in our new living space and learn to make ourselves at home for the next two months, starting to cook for ourselves and establishing new rituals (like bonding through watching Suits together during dinner). We have learned to navigate some parts of the town with the help of our local partners, learning where to buy groceries and hot meals, and we have done a bit of exploring on the weekends and our walks to work. Although moving to an unfamiliar area has been challenging, we have been able to improvise and overcome to...

SRT Spring 2022 Reflection

May 1, 2022December 10, 2024 by Aarushi VenkatakrishnanNo Comments

This summer, 4 students will join the Center as part of the Student Research Training Program (SRT). Hear their thoughts heading into the program. Bentley Choi When I first applied to the SRT program, I merely expected to ‘conduct’ research abroad. In reality, I learned more important skills such as writing IRB amendments, scheduling a meeting with teammates, and communicating with a research team in Kisumu. My goal for this summer is to apply what I learned from Dr. Eric Green’s Global Health Research Methods class into a real-life setting, and I believe we are making our way to this goal since the team proposed a new way to evaluate the intervention! I look forward to conducting observational study and focus group discussions. Also, I am hoping to learn how to navigate myself in a new living environment and what are Kenya’s unique cultural factors that influence stigma and perception towards reproductive health since it is also related to my senior thesis...

BD4RH Spring 2022 Reflection

May 1, 2022December 10, 2024 by Aarushi VenkatakrishnanNo Comments

Our Big Data for Reproductive Health Bass Connections team worked on three teams throughout the year and presented their work at the Bass Connections Showcase. Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) Techniques to examine Stigma with Cervical Cancer in Kenya Members: Foxx Hart, Lynne Wang, Alexandra Lawerence, and Neha Shrishail For our project, we utilized topic modeling to identify recurring themes and sentiments in HIV interview data with Kenyan women, as well as develop an understanding of stigma frameworks. This year we were able to learn new technical and project management skills while diving deeper into the emerging interdisciplinary space between quantitative machine learning and qualitative social science research. Due to the many nuances and complexities involved with categorizing stigma, we have concluded that rudimentary NLP is not sufficient for identifying the various forms of stigma in qualitative data. However, we believe that this was a great introduction to applying these methods to an important area in global reproductive health. We hope more research...

Returning to the Field

April 10, 2022December 10, 2024 by Kelly HunterNo Comments

In March 2022, I was able to return to Kenya to resume my dissertation research. It was wonderful to be back after two years away and to see and work with Kenyan colleagues in person again. I spent part of the time conducting follow-up interviews with sexual and reproductive health NGOs in Kisumu and part of the time preparing to conduct a survey in Migori County later this year. My qualitative work began in February 2020 when I was last in Kenya. I met with several Kisumu-based sexual and reproductive health NGOs to learn about how the US’s global gag rule had impacted their operations, relationships with donors, and relationships with other NGOs. When the pandemic hit and Kenya experienced lockdowns, I along with my undergraduate research assistants Ema Kuczura and Sarah Hubner, conducted semi-structured interviews over zoom with roughly 35 NGOs to understand how they were responding to issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic, including increased demand for their services,...

Michele O’Shea and her recruitment observations in Kenya

March 22, 2022December 10, 2024 by Aarushi VenkatakrishnanNo Comments

By: Michele O'Shea During October to November 2021, I spent 6 weeks Kisumu Kenya working with our collaborators at Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral Hospital. Our specific project is aimed at evaluating a new set of illustrations to assess for symptomatic pelvic organ prolapse and urinary incontinence. It is an early step in the process of understanding the burden of pelvic floor disorders in Kenya and informing strategies to better diagnose and treat patients with these conditions. As part of the study, we are asking patients presenting for outpatient care to tell us whether they have the symptoms represented in different illustrations of prolapse, urgency urinary incontinence and stress urinary incontinence. Then, to determine whether the patient clinically has symptomatic prolapse or urinary incontinence, we speak with the patient about her symptoms and perform a brief pelvic exam. From the study’s start, we were plagued by slow recruitment, primarily related to patients declining to undergo a pelvic exam. My co-investigators, Dr....

Jacob Stocks and his experience working on mSaada

March 18, 2022December 10, 2024 by Jacob StocksNo Comments

Duke MsGH ’20, Jacob Stocks, talks about his experience working on an mHealth app to support cervical cancer screening in western Kenya. The app was developed by four Duke seniors (‘T20) as part of their Computer Science Capstone course. Stocks’ experience co-designing the app with end-users, clinicians and community health volunteers in Kenya, was published recently in JMIR Formative Research. In 2019, I worked alongside members of the Center for Global Reproductive Health to develop and pilot test mSaada, a mobile phone app for use by lay-providers during cervical cancer screening. This experience was an exercise in self-reflection, flexibility, and perseverance, as the study team had to acknowledge the gaps in our intervention and work effectively and efficiently to address them while adapting to additional challenges as they arose. Our team, working face-to-face with local collaborators as well as virtually with app developers, conducted feedback sessions with community health volunteers and clinicians in Kisumu and Migori, Kenya. The main findings of this...

‹1 234 5 ›»