Kathy McCarty Visits From Chidamoyo

The Center for Global Health Nursing and the School of Nursing are pleased to welcome Kathy McCarty as she visits University of Washington School of Nursing on September 12^th and 13^th. She will be speaking about “Practicing Health Care in a Rural Zimbabwean Setting” at 11 am – 12 pm on Thursday September 12^th in HSB T661, immediately following her presentation she will welcome an open forum brown bag session where attendees can sit down with her.

Kathy McCarty is a long-term advanced practice nurse in Zimbabwe, at Chidamoyo Hospital, Ms. McCarty got her credentials and started her nursing practice in California. Ms. McCarty was motivated into pursuing a nursing career after a visit to Zimbabwe in the mid-70s—where she realized acquiring nursing skills could help her contribute to care provision in settings such as Zimbabwe. Kathy has been practicing in Chidamoyo—a rural hospital near Karoi, Zimbabwe, since 1991. As the Sister-in-Charge at Chidamoyo, Kathy has many responsibilities besides administrative tasks and clinical care, such as supervising all nursing staff in the hospital, and in their outreach clinics. Kathy has also housed and mentored hundreds of Zimbabwean and international students who are interested in a variety of health careers including nursing, medicine, physical therapy, physicians’ assistants, and lab scientists. Under her direction, Chidamoyo serves as a research site for many collaborative research projects related to improving HIV care among children, teens, and adults. In addition, Chidamoyo served as a site for an implementation science project examining how to incorporate HPV self-sampling among women in the community and HPV testing in the early detection and prevention of cervical cancer. She maintains a blog about her experiences at Chidamoyo which you can check out here. You can also read more about her research about HPV testing here

If you are interested in supporting Chidamoyo Hospital in Zimbabwe, the local chapter of Friends of Chidamoyo is hosting a benefit auction on September 7^th, 2019. Event information and tickets for the auction are still available here.

Global Health Nursing Course

Registration time is upon us, and we are pleased to offer NURS 581: Global Health Nursing again this Autumn Quarter. This course has been designed by Co-directors, Sarah Gimbel and Pamela Kohler, to explore the health provider perspective and will give students an overview of global health equity. Instructor Sarah Gimbel will lead the class in discussions regarding:

• Global health measurement frameworks and global benchmarks
• UN Sustainable Development Goals
• Infectious and non-communicable diseases and injury
• Maternal, adolescent, and child health
• Workforce and human resources for health
• Emergency preparedness and management

This course is co-listed in the Department of Global Health as G H 574: Special Topics in Global Health and is listed as an accepted elective for graduate certificates in International Humanitarian Response, Global Health or Global Health of Women, Adolescents, & Children. Please contact the Center for Global Health Nursing (cghn@uw.edu) with any questions regarding this course listing. All graduate health science students are encouraged to register. Undergraduates may be considered with instructor permission.

Blog Update: Iquitos

Andrea Shelton and I have had a busy couple of weeks here in Iquitos. Our last couple of weeks have centered around continuing the Academia Familiar del Amazonas (AFA) program started by last year’s Peru Scholars. The intention of this program is to support the women of the Claverito Community with education sessions addressing issues they have identified as priorities. Therefore, we spent a week planning and implementing a community meeting meant to identify their priorities. We even held a train the trainer’s event where we prepped two facilitators on the planned activities and purpose of the meeting.

All were welcome at the community meeting for women.

The community meeting was held on a Sunday morning on the newly built community platform and was a huge success! All women ages 12 and over were invited to the meeting. We divided the women into two groups based on age: 12-17 years old and 18 years old and up. Then everybody completed two activities where they wrote down specific subjects they wanted to discuss. Subjects did not have to be directly related to their physical health, but all are linked to their overall well-being in some way. We were so pleased and excited to see the women express interest and a willingness to be part of AFA. We could not have completed this community meeting without tremendous help from members of the community and members of the InterACTION Labs team. When we arrived at the community on Sunday morning, members of the community had already put up a tent, table, and chairs for the women. The UW medical students and landscape architect students kept all of the little kids entertained with coloring while two members of the greater Iquitos community ran the meeting.

Members of the InterACTION Labs team setting up for the community meeting on the new platform.

The next week was spent translating the answers and determining what local resources are available for addressing the identified priorities. We are now in the process of visiting several local government offices in order to learn about services already available and how Claverito community members can access the services. Since several resources are already available in Iquitos, our goal is to make sure the women know what services are available and how to access them.

Andrea Shelton and I outside the hospital before our first shadow experience.

We have also been shadowing several doctors and nurses in the maternity ward of the Regional hospital, Felipe Santiago Arriola Iglesias.” We were allowed to attend two births and multiple lectures. Besides the births, my favorite part was getting an in-depth description of the World Health Organization’s form used in the hospital to track progress during labor and determine high-risk situations.

For fun over the last couple of weeks, we have been exploring Iquitos and the Amazon. We spent a couple of days in the Amazon jungle fishing for piranhas, bird watching, searching for monkeys and learning what plants people living in the jungle use for medicine. We took a boat ride around Claverito community to look at the vegetation islands that get created as the Amazon water level rises. We saw countless different birds and plants. The water level is receding quickly and in about two weeks we will be able to walk through this same area! We also participated in a local “marathon” that is a fundraiser for four local houses serving vulnerable populations. We were very concerned at first because the race was being advertised as a marathon. Needless to say, we were very relieved to find out the marathon was a four-kilometer walk/run!

Members of the InterACTION Labs team wearing our race t-shirts.

Andrea Shelton and I on the Amazon River during our jungle adventure.

Until next time!

Hannah

Jillian Pintye recognized by WGHA

Dr. Jillian Pintye, Assistant Professor in the Behavioral Nursing and Health Informatics Department at the School of Nursing, was recognized by the Washington Global Health Alliance as a 2019 Pioneers Rising Leader. Judges noted that her impatience to prevent HIV is already making a difference for pregnant women and has expanded HIV prevention options for policymakers. Congratulations, Dr. Pintye!

Introducing UW Global Rural Health Fellow Krysta Byrnes

Since the creation of the Center for Global Health Nursing in 2016, Dr. Sarah Gimbel has been working hard together with first Dr. Bob Onders and more recently, Dr. Kyle Pohl from the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC) to build a doctoral fellowship opportunity for recent DNP graduates. The Global Rural Health Fellowship (GRHF) was initiated in the Departments of Emergency and Internal Medicine at UW. This unique post-doctoral fellowship specifically for DNP graduates aims to provide recently graduated and licensed nurse practitioners the knowledge, leadership skills and hands-on experiences necessary to become effective leaders, clinicians, managers, and advocates in the field of global and rural health. In turn, Tribal Health Organizations in rural areas of Alaska who work with ANTHC will benefit from increased access to advanced nursing care.

The ANTHC is a non-profit organization which strives to meet the health needs of Alaska Native and American Indian people living in Alaska. ANTHC is the largest, most comprehensive Tribal Health Organization in the United States and Alaska’s second-largest health employer with more than 3,000 employees offering an array of health services to people throughout our nation’s largest state.

This partnership between the UW Center for Global Health Nursing and ANTHC will allow recent DNP graduates to live in rural Alaska for up to 12-18 months followed an additional 3-6 months in a low middle-income country (LMIC). This fellowship provides clinicians with experience serving vulnerable populations in both rural Alaska and in an LMIC. DNPs undergo a competitive application process which includes interviews with the UW as well as ANTHC coordinators and directors at participating sites in Alaska.

This year, we are excited to announce our first placement in Alaska as part of this fellowship. On August 1st, Dr. Krysta Byrnes (DNP-FNP) will be the first DNP GRHF. Krysta will be spending 12 months working in the Eastern Aleutian Islands with periodic visits to Anchorage for training opportunities including one month at UW in Seattle for a global health course with other clinical fellows. Krysta is “passionate about partnering with patients and communities, empowering them to meet their own goals and to live full, productive, and healthy lives.” She was born in Japan within a universal health care system and worked abroad in Vietnam. She has also worked extensively in rural Washington state. All of these experiences helped shape her worldview that healthcare is a right for all people. After her 12 months in Alaska, she plans to spend time in either Malawi or Peru working to improve clinical capacity in marginalized settings. Her plans after the GRHF will be to work in primary care and use her experiences to advocate for ways to make the health system work for everyone including the most disenfranchised.

CGHN at the 2019 WIN Conference

To kick off Spring Quarter, numerous faculty and students from the University of Washington School of Nursing participated in the 2019 Western Institute of Nursing (WIN) Conference. WIN is one of four regional nursing research organizations in the US. Members of WIN include individual researchers, clinicians, educators, students, academic institutions, and health care organizations. Every year, they host researchers from their membership at their annual research conference. This year, the research conference took place on April 10-13^th in San Diego, CA and the Center for Global Health Nursing is pleased to announce that three posters were presented by students active in the global health community. Congratulations!

Title: Fostering DNP-PhD Student Collaboration: A Global Project

Authors: Yvette Rodriguez (PhD Student), Morgan Busse (DNP-FNP student), Marissa Masihdas (DNP-FNP student), Jane Kim (DNP-FNP student), Dr. Sarah Gimbel

Title: A learning Approach for Nurses Providing Option B+ Services in Mozambique

Authors: Jane Kim (DNP-FNP Student), Dr. Sarah Gimbel

(Not Pictured) Title: Patient Needs and Recommendations to Refine a Tuberculosis Support App

Authors: Yvette Rodriguez (PhD Student), Dr. Sarah Iribarren

Keio University Short-Term Exchange

By: Sandra Kolberg (ABSN Student) and Jessica Lee (BSN Student)

Being a part of the Nursing program at the University of Washington has provided us with some incredible opportunities. We receive constant encouragement to learn and grow through diverse experiences on campus, within the community, or even internationally. One of the experiences available to us was the short-term nursing studies program at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan. After receiving an email outlining the program and encouraging us to apply, UW was going to send two nursing students to learn about aging populations from a global health perspective. Nursing students from four other countries would participate and we would spend the week immersed in Japanese culture while discussing how nursing practice varied between our respective countries.

Our time spent at Keio University was not only a great learning experience, but also beneficial to our future careers as nurses. During this nursing exchange, we were able to collaborate with students from Japan, China, Korea, and the United Kingdom to learn more about nursing systems in other countries and brainstorm ideas on how to alleviate the issue of an increasingly aging society. We spent our time in Keio University’ classrooms listening to lectures from professors and we also had hands-on experience at Keio Hospital and shadowing home healthcare nurses. Seeing how the healthcare system runs in Japan was a humbling experience, as the nurses treat their patients with the utmost compassion and kindness. However, the most meaningful part of this trip was being able to connect with the nursing students from other countries. Nursing is a field that requires continual learning and growth. As such, it was a great opportunity to learn firsthand what it means and what it is like to be a nurse in other parts of the world so that we can learn how to be better nurses as well.

The learning and growth that occurred on this trip exceeded all expectations. We were welcomed with open arms to participate and observe how another country provides care to its people through nursing. The other students from each country were so warm and welcoming; wonderful friendships developed regardless of any cultural or language barrier. We were able to laugh and joke with new friends and colleagues, experience a new culture, and discuss changes we would like to see in our own healthcare systems. We were able to inspire each other through each country’s strengths, and develop our own ideals we would like to put into practice. We are incredibly thankful for this experience, and will take our newly developed global perspective into our careers as professional nurses.

Brown Bag Seminar – May 14

Join the Center for Global Health Nursing by welcoming Weichao Yuwen and Visiting Scholar Wenzhe Hua as they speak on the topic of “Challenges and Opportunities in Parent Engagement in Neonatal Intensive Care Units in China”.

Weichao Yuwen teaches and conducts research in using technologies to promote sleep health and family health in children with chronic conditions. She is also collaborating with several hospitals and schools of nursing in China to promote family-centered care in pediatric hospital units. Weichao is a member of the Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing, Sleep Research Society, and a founding member of the Pacific-Northwest Chinese Nurses Association.