Students work to improve health status of Nicaraguans
July 16, 2009
Four graduate students from the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health are spending the summer in Nicaragua as part of a collaborative project between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill schools of medicine, nursing and public health and the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua – Leon (UNAN).
Jennifer Horney, PhD, MPH, works on surveys with maternal and child health master’s students Mary Dickinson and Emily Treleaven.
The students are Sheri Denslow and Jess Edwards, from the Department of Epidemiology, and Mary Dickinson and Emily Treleaven, from the Department of Maternal and Child Health.
The partnership between UNC-Chapel Hill and UNAN aims to improve the health status of residents of the remote North Atlantic Autonomous Region of Nicaragua (RAAN). After working for several weeks at the UNAN campus in Leon, 11 UNC students traveled to RAAN with UNAN medical students participating in a regular rotation.
UNC students will spend their time in RAAN working in the clinic run by UNAN and conducting interviews in 30 communities in the region. The interviews are designed to collect data about reproductive health, access to safe water, incidence of diarrheal disease, and access to vaccines. Data collected will be used to improve health services provision in the region and begin the development of a more comprehensive surveillance system.
The students will return to Chapel Hill in early August.
