In my bid to stay sane and focused, I occasionally ask myself the question “why”. Why was I born? Why am I doing what I am doing now? Why do I continue to be a part of the movement towards health equity? The last three months of my life have been very eventful with reinforcing experiences and revelations that kept me going.
Thanks to Global Health Corps, I was able to speak on a panel at the Save the Children advocacy summit titled “Front-line health workers; challenges and lesson learned”. I shared my story of Self, Us, Now and some experiences I had while practicing in a rural community in the northern part of Nigeria. I shared about a child that was brought to my clinic in company of her mother and siblings because of a recurring feverish illness that would not respond to antimalarial medication or other previous treatment. After examining the child and assessing her condition, I decided to conduct some laboratory investigation on her which included an HIV test. The HIV test returned positive and out of curiosity and concern the mother requested for every member of her family to be tested and to my teams’ amazement, every member of that family of 5 turned out positive for HIV. This brings up multiple issues at different levels, with some being the need for increased awareness about preventable health conditions, health screenings and personnel needs to fulfill these tasks. A care giver should not have to wait till their wards/child’s illness is “serious” before they seek help. Clinics in this community are typically far from members of the community and also crowded with long lines,that I can understand the reason a care giver may want to wait till it is “necessary” to see the “almighty physician”. In other to avoid these type of occurrences, one plausible intervention will be to ensure that front-line health workers are available within communities, trained to provide basic health care services, conduct screenings where necessary and create awareness about health conditions.
I continued on to Mississippi gulf coast on a trip with my supervisor to one of our programs. This particular trip was for chart review and evaluation of our program; it ended up being all that and a wake up call for me. It brought to light the continued struggle of the community 8 years post Katrina and 7 years post BP oil spill. Though the world may have forgotten about these occurrences, these communities continue to experience health consequences and psycho-social issues that are closely related to the disasters. Program staff also drew attention to the increasing numbers of mental health diagnosis made among children and adolescents.
Another major outing was my participation in the UN foundation’s Girl Up summit in DC. The vision of the summit was to enable a deeper connection with the Girl Up campaign that aims for a world where all girls irrespective of where they live have access to good healthcare, the opportunity to be educated and live in a safe environment. My panel focused on career development and sharing with these highly motivated young girls girls my narrative of why I am part of the global health equity movement. We had a discussion about the issues of girl empowerment in Nigeria, the culture that perpetuates gender inequalities and had a chance to discuss their relevance to the movement towards equity.
On return from my many trips of which I shared three experiences, I came across an article written by Dr Paul Farmer titled: Investigating the root causes of the global health crisis. He told the story of an upstream doctor who looked beyond the physical ailment of his patients for factors in their life that led to their presenting complaints. He brought up interesting points about seeing patients in a holistic way, rather than considering just the physical complaints they present with. He stated that looking deeply into environments, behaviors, social support systems and resources will fortify the intervention we eventually decide on. The article spoke to my experiences and helped to answer some of my “whys”. As I continue my journey towards a healthier world, I am re-energized, especially for the future and all I will love to be a part of.