August 10, 2015

Four graduate students at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health have completed research projects under the mentorship of public health experts at IntraHealth International, a global nongovernmental organization headquartered in Chapel Hill, N.C. The students’ participation marks the sixth year of the UNC-IntraHealth Summer Fellows Program, which aims to provide Gillings School graduate students with hands-on experience in global health.

Left to right are UNC-IntraHealth Scholars Jean Lambert Chalachala, Christina Villella, Yanica Faustin and Rebeccah Bartlett.

Left to right are UNC-IntraHealth fellows Jean Lambert Chalachala, Christina Villella, Yanica Faustin and Rebeccah Bartlett. Photo by Rebecca Aguie for IntraHealth International.

The fellows are Rebeccah Bartlett, a nurse and midwife from Australia, now a master’s student, Jean Lambert Chalachala, a medical doctor from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) pursuing a master’s degree, and Yanica Faustin, a doctoral student, all in the Gillings School’s Department of Maternal and Child Health; and Christina Villella, a master’s student in the School’s Department of Health Behavior.

The students used the summer opportunity to work on some of the most pressing global health concerns, including noncommunicable diseases, mobile health, health systems strengthening and maternity care, using real data and the most up-to-date research.

Bartlett conducted a literature review, advocacy brief and recommendations about maternity care that IntraHealth staff members will use to improve working conditions for health workers and the quality of care received by their patients. She previously had studied reproductive health in refugee camps after World War II and volunteered in indigenous communities in the Philippines and Papua New Guinea.

“Respectful maternity care is everyone’s responsibility,” Bartlett said. “If a woman can’t be protected and cared for at the exact moment she brings life into this world, when can she expect it?”

Her insightful blog entry about experiences in a maternity ward in the Philippines is available online.

Dr. Chalachala, a Rotary Peace Fellow and former head of a rural hospital in the DRC, analyzed health workforce data from the DRC. He uncovered several challenges within the DRC health sector, including ghost workers and an aging health workforce. A third of the country’s nurses, for example, are over 60 years old, the official age of retirement in the DRC.

“Many should be retired,” Chalachala says. “And we will need new nurses to replace them. Working with these data helped me to realize how important the management of human resources is.”

Read more about Chalachala in this IntraHealth blog post.

Faustin conducted a literature review and developed recommendations in line with the World Health Organization’s objectives to reduce noncommunicable diseases 25 percent by 2025. Previously, she had worked at the Center for Global Health at RTI International on projects related to maternal and neonatal health, tuberculosis and drug development.

She wrote an essay about her experiences in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, which is available online.

Villella studied mHealth, the use of mobile devices in medicine and public health. She mapped mHealth programs related to family planning, immunization, and maternal, neonatal and child health to show how mHealth is used and to identify gaps in effectiveness. Her blog entry about mHealth is available here.

“Mobile phones have the power to reach people in places that electricity and roads don’t yet reach,” she says. “The potential to harness this connectivity for better health is there.”

Villella previously worked at RTI International and as a full-time volunteer in a community health center in Washington, DC, where she taught health education classes, managed clinic policies and assisted with electronic health record implementation.

In previous years, the competitive UNC-IntraHealth fellowships have been awarded for the study of HIV, family planning, maternal and neonatal health, health communications, digital health, evaluation and other pressing public health topics. Twenty-seven fellows have completed the program since its inception in 2010.


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Gillings School of Global Public Health contact: David Pesci, director of communications, (919) 962-2600 or dpesci@unc.edu

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