As a nurse working in a school of public health, I get questions from students who are nurses or those planning to go into nursing after obtaining a public health degree. Commonly-asked questions include: “…how can I merge nursing skills and public health in the real world…”, “…can I continue clinical nursing after public health…” My standard short answers are: “…nursing skills are very applicable to public health everywhere…”, and “…yes, you can continue clinical practice while doing public health…” This year, I have worked with several teams and colleagues on some exciting public health projects such as: 1) working with refugees in Jordan and South Sudan; 2) documenting stories of foreign aid and research on sexual violence in Kenya; and 3) organizing HIV/AIDS research among key populations in Ghana.
Last Spring, we traveled with colleagues and students from Boston University (BU) to Bondo, a sleepy town in western Kenya to work on a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation project called PamojaTogether. Pamoja is the Swahili word for together. Eight BU students joined 10 of their peers from the Great Lakes University of Kisumu (GLUK) and Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology (JOOUST). The students researched and documented stories of foreign aid in communities in western Kenya. To learn more about the PamojaTogether project, visit our website and like us on Facebook. The more likes we get the greater our chances of getting more $$$s from the Gates Foundation to continue with this important work. If you like a story, video footage or one of the hundreds of photographs, share with a friend and spread the word about PamojaTogether.
During July and August, I had another opportunity to watch nurses in action as part of a team that conducted reproductive health assessments in four open camps hosting 118,000 refugees in Maban County, Upper Nile State in South Sudan. The majority of refugees were from the State of Blue Nile in Sudan (Sudan and South Sudan are two separate countries). Our team assessed the availability, quality and utilization of reproductive health services in the four camps. The assessment was commissioned by the Inter-agency Working Group on Reproductive Health in Crises. My responsibility was to assess health facilities that served both refugees and the local population. Most notably, the health care facilities were run by nurses from different countries around the world including Kenya, United States, Canada, Netherlands, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Ghana and Australia. Some nurses were on short mission trips while others had longer contracts (one year or more) but all had taken time off to work in very challenging conditions in South Sudan. Most noteworthy, these were nurses working in a public health environment. These are just two examples of nurses working with agencies to develop and implement programs on the front lines to improve public health around the world.
Monica Adhiambo Onyango, RNM, PhD
Assistant Professor
Boston University School of Public Health