From Vermont to Bangladesh: Learning about public health

Background: In today's global environment, public health professionals must be educationally prepared to meet the needs of people from diverse backgrounds to provide safe, appropriate, and high quality care. A powerful strategy is learning through immersion (living and learning in another culture). These experiences increase: student awareness of their own beliefs, values, practices, and behaviors; ability to learn from clients; and ability to cope with factors affecting the client's health and living conditions. However, these experiences are not always readily available to health professional students.

Program design: A 3 1/2 week immersion experience for 17 senior undergraduate nursing students was organized in Bangladesh in collaboration with the Independent University, Bangladesh during January 2008. Working with interpreters in rural villages, students learned about the people and public health issues through surveys and interviews on topics such as gender health, environment, and poverty.

Results: Preliminary data analysis (descriptive statistics and thematic analysis) is providing knowledge on which to base strategies “to give back to the Bangladeshi people” for the next student group; e.g. teaching health at the high school, and village health fairs. A beginning model of immersion experiences will be tested in subsequent years. Students learned that looking behind behavior for possible cultural explanations to provide culturally appropriate healthcare is a necessity. As well, they saw that public health makes a significant impact on the lives of people, no matter where they live.

Recommendations: More study abroad experiences as well as funding needs to be developed to allow an increased number of health professional students access to immersion experiences abroad.