There was a boy named Sanjay, a 12-year-old orphan who was on regular anti-retroviral medication at the HIV centre I was in charge of. He lived probably the harshest life I had heard of- sleeping underneath trucks at night and salvaging food from the garbage bins at local eateries. When he would visit for his monthly check up I would share my lunch with him. After 7 months and 25 days of caring for him, he said goodbye and never returned to our centre.
Despite our best efforts to locate him, that was the last we saw of him. We had the medicines, the clinics, the staff but still could do nothing to alter his fate. It was this painful interaction with him that made me realise that health & disease were not quite the black & white picture my medical school textbooks portrayed. Instead, they belonged to a much larger, complex, evolving organism, with far-reaching effects.
As an Intern at Christian Medical College & Hospital (CMC), Vellore. I had the opportunity to serve in remote rural communities, running health clinics and maternity check-ups. My time here put me in the midst of health policy implementation and first-hand experience. I was soon appointed as the Medical Officer of CMC 's publicly funded HIV Centre, being directly responsible for over 2000 patients. Heading a team of nurses, pharmacists & social workers we worked to ensure all of our patients benefited from the various health schemes & policies. I was also responsible for training nurses, medical students and allied health professionals about HIV, on handling HIV patients, as well as Post Exposure Prophylaxis(PEP). I would often find myself asking the question “Does this really work?”, “What can be done to improve this policy?”, “What measurable effect would these changes have on healthcare?” It would be a year later that I would find out that this very thought process was the dedicated job of an Outcomes Researcher, and realise that a career in public health was my long term goal. As physicians and policy makers, we need to be innovative in instituting improvements within a fairly constrained framework, but still utilise cutting edge research. Greater interdisciplinary collaborations are required, and interdisciplinary professionals with in-the-field experience are needed. I believe that, in the role of an outcomes researcher, I can be the critical link that works towards optimisation of health care programmes & systems, ensuring their applicability to large populations of people. It is my desire to address the ever-widening gap of medical research and its actual application to people’s lives. By creating these bridges in the most critical areas of public health, I am confident that I can make a difference, and prevent needless suffering. My reasons to apply to the Yale School of Public Health are for several reasons - The university has a rich history of individuals who have sought to make an impact on the world, and one such person is the former president, Bill Clinton. His health care foundation has changed thousands, if not millions of lives across the world. It proves that he was no ordinary man, and the institution that gave him the means to nurture his idea was far more than a mere catalyst. The next instance was when I had the opportunity to listen to a lecture by Dr Ted Cohen, Associate Professor of Epidemiology at Yale, at the Mcgill summer institute last year. His lecture on an introduction to disease modelling caught my attention and made me …show more content…
I did my best to help with the relief efforts, creating a crowd-sourcing map to mark health camps as well as to identify underserved areas, and direct relief groups to areas that were severely flooded. I also compiled several pamphlets with safety instructions for volunteers involved in rescue efforts, preparing food as well as for those stuck in their homes. The pamphlets were available in English as well as in the local language(Tamil) and was disseminated through social media as well as in physical form through relief teams. An idea I developed was to use crowdsourcing as a means of studying movement patterns of diseases in a natural disaster and serve as a real-time update for evidence-based medical decisions. Although the process of collecting information proved too difficult as I lacked the resources, I believe it is an idea that has some
Despite our best efforts to locate him, that was the last we saw of him. We had the medicines, the clinics, the staff but still could do nothing to alter his fate. It was this painful interaction with him that made me realise that health & disease were not quite the black & white picture my medical school textbooks portrayed. Instead, they belonged to a much larger, complex, evolving organism, with far-reaching effects.
As an Intern at Christian Medical College & Hospital (CMC), Vellore. I had the opportunity to serve in remote rural communities, running health clinics and maternity check-ups. My time here put me in the midst of health policy implementation and first-hand experience. I was soon appointed as the Medical Officer of CMC 's publicly funded HIV Centre, being directly responsible for over 2000 patients. Heading a team of nurses, pharmacists & social workers we worked to ensure all of our patients benefited from the various health schemes & policies. I was also responsible for training nurses, medical students and allied health professionals about HIV, on handling HIV patients, as well as Post Exposure Prophylaxis(PEP). I would often find myself asking the question “Does this really work?”, “What can be done to improve this policy?”, “What measurable effect would these changes have on healthcare?” It would be a year later that I would find out that this very thought process was the dedicated job of an Outcomes Researcher, and realise that a career in public health was my long term goal. As physicians and policy makers, we need to be innovative in instituting improvements within a fairly constrained framework, but still utilise cutting edge research. Greater interdisciplinary collaborations are required, and interdisciplinary professionals with in-the-field experience are needed. I believe that, in the role of an outcomes researcher, I can be the critical link that works towards optimisation of health care programmes & systems, ensuring their applicability to large populations of people. It is my desire to address the ever-widening gap of medical research and its actual application to people’s lives. By creating these bridges in the most critical areas of public health, I am confident that I can make a difference, and prevent needless suffering. My reasons to apply to the Yale School of Public Health are for several reasons - The university has a rich history of individuals who have sought to make an impact on the world, and one such person is the former president, Bill Clinton. His health care foundation has changed thousands, if not millions of lives across the world. It proves that he was no ordinary man, and the institution that gave him the means to nurture his idea was far more than a mere catalyst. The next instance was when I had the opportunity to listen to a lecture by Dr Ted Cohen, Associate Professor of Epidemiology at Yale, at the Mcgill summer institute last year. His lecture on an introduction to disease modelling caught my attention and made me …show more content…
I did my best to help with the relief efforts, creating a crowd-sourcing map to mark health camps as well as to identify underserved areas, and direct relief groups to areas that were severely flooded. I also compiled several pamphlets with safety instructions for volunteers involved in rescue efforts, preparing food as well as for those stuck in their homes. The pamphlets were available in English as well as in the local language(Tamil) and was disseminated through social media as well as in physical form through relief teams. An idea I developed was to use crowdsourcing as a means of studying movement patterns of diseases in a natural disaster and serve as a real-time update for evidence-based medical decisions. Although the process of collecting information proved too difficult as I lacked the resources, I believe it is an idea that has some