PHR Student Blog

UPDATE: See the webcast of the discussion that took place after the screening, with Errol Morris and Farnoosh Hashemian, moderated by PHR’s Nathaniel Raymond.

I am excited to announce that we now have twenty-seven campuses joining us for PHR and Participant Media’s nationwide screening of Standard Operating Procedure on October 6 at 7pm EST!

Today, Monday, October 6, participating campuses will host an exclusive simulcast screening of SOP, prior to its release on DVD. Academy Award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris and Farnoosh Hashemian, lead author of PHR’s landmark report Broken Laws, Broken Lives, will appear together at Harvard Medical School for a webcast interview and a live-chat discussion with audiences on all the campuses.

Join us for this unprecedented event! See the link for the webcast at SOPScreening.org, and invite your friends to join us. Or come to the main screening at Harvard Medical School, at the Armenise (Bldg. D) Amphitheater, at 220 Longwood Ave., Boston. (Please plan to arrive at 6:30; the film will begin promptly at 7 p.m.)

Learn more about how health professionals played a major role in PHR’s investigative work to create Broken Laws, Broken Lives. Watch these videos from two key medical evaluators sharing their personal experiences evaluating the eleven detainees featured in the report:

• Sondra Crosby, MD
• Leanh Nguyen, PhD

RELATED LINKS

• Learn more about filmmaker Errol Morris
• Watch the trailer for Standard Operating Procedure
• Watch the YouTube video of Farnoosh Hashemian talking about her involvement in Broken Laws, Broken Lives.

If you have any questions about PHR’s National Day of Awareness on October 6, please email Danielle.

We look forward to virtually meeting you all on October 6!

As founder of the student chapter at the University of Kansas School of Medicine, and one of only a handful of people who had even heard of PHR on the Medical Center campus (KUMC), I needed a way to inform people about PHR, recruit them to the organization, educate them about advocacy, and offer them a little fun. There are literally hundreds of student organizations on campus, guaranteeing that everyone receives twenty emails a day announcing every sort of activity – from a lunch presentation by Medical Students for Choice to weekly hip-hop dance classes. I knew that to attract a good group of people and get them to focus on PHR for a few hours, I needed to get their attention by doing something different. I decided on a “neighborhood” barbecue for Saturday, September 13. I promoted the event with emails and by speaking to each Medical School class. I asked around for sponsors – my school was more than willing to give a little money and a friend’s company (Guinness) provided drinks.

The day of the event, I organized my house into multiple “stations”. I had a few friends bring their laptops over, and used each to showcase a different PHR platform – for example, I showed a video of Farnoosh telling the story of Lathe at one of the stations, and spread out next to the computer were the Broken Laws, Broken Lives report and some other PHR material. At another station, I displayed the PHR slideshow about Darfur with some related picture books and reports. A third station promoted Standard Operating Procedure and provided a screening sign-up sheet. Another station was devoted to the type of actions that PHR takes, such as petitions and letter writing, as highlighted by the Free the Iran Docs campaign and the Women’s Rights platform.

When people arrived, I gave them a quick overview of PHR, offered them food and drinks, and encouraged them to check out the various computers. The different stations gave them a chance to ingest a lot of information quickly, sparking lots of conversation, and the relaxed social setting of the barbecue encouraged people to share their own experiences with international human rights issues. The result? My student chapter now has 25 members and four requests for officer positions.

As the young doctor led me through Mulago Hospital, I noticed how the walls came alive at their base where patients waited for care and their families bustled around them. Mulago hospital is Uganda’s largest referral medical center, and with only 1,500 beds, as my guide informed me, it serves a population three times its capacity. The country’s leading newspapers periodically offer stories of patients dying in the corridors hoping for treatment that don’t come. “Death in Mulago” was the front-page headline of the Saturday Vision during my previous visit to Uganda. In that article, its author estimated that 270 infants die each month in the hospital’s labor and delivery ward, and reported finding 20 women, in labor, lying on that ward’s floor the day she visited.

I returned to Uganda this summer to discuss with members of the country’s human rights and health care communities the role that “rights” play in overcoming the crisis of Ugandans’ universal access to empty health care. Over the past decade, Uganda’s government has invested heavily in decentralizing its health care system by building a lot of medical centers around the country, but without supplying them with adequate human and material resources. The country loses nearly 30% of its newly trained physicians to better paying opportunities abroad, leaving the nation with a 1:13,000 doctor-to-population ratio (in some rural areas of the country it’s as high as 1:120,000–in the US it’s 1:390). In the face of all this, the Uganda Human Rights Commission (UHRC) has formed a Right to Health desk to help monitor the government’s fulfillment of its obligations to provide adequate medical services for all its citizens, and to act as a tribunal for Ugandans to file complaints against their government for its failure to do so. Recognizing how grave the health care crisis is in Uganda, I was curious to learn if those entrenched in overcoming it believed that this new desk at the commission, or that sensitizing Uganda’s medical workers and citizens about the right to health, would make an impact.

Once we arrived inside the communal office for Mulago’s medical residents, the young doctor and I cleared a spot in the back corner for our interview. Like nearly everyone I had interviewed before her, she believed that access to adequate health care is a fundamental human right, but that her government’s ratification of international agreements to assure this form of access has had little or no impact on the ground.  Like many of the other interviewees, she had a hard time deciding whether poverty or government mismanagement and corruption posed the greatest challenge to providing adequate health care services. When I asked her, “What does the human rights approach need to succeed?” she gave me an answer I had heard several times before. “Michael, I don’t know if you know this, but life is cheap in Uganda.” The doctor then explained to me that when parents bring their child, sick with malaria, to the hospital, and the child dies because she doesn’t receive the proper drugs, they just collect the child’s body and go home without making a noise. If they are lucky, the parents will have another child.  With Uganda having one of the highest under-five mortality rates and one of the highest fertility rates in the world, it’s not hard to believe her. She concluded the interview by stating that human rights will fail to empower Ugandans to struggle for better health care while they are still convinced that life here is so cheap.

Mike Otremba is a 2^nd Year medical student at Yale Medical School and leader of the PHR chapter. This past summer he traveled to Kampala and worked with the Uganda Human Rights Commission on a study of the right to health. While there, he met with a wide number of human rights activists and health care professionals, including members of PHR’s Partner group AGHA.

PEPFAR was finally re-authorized in July with $48 billion of funding. Health professional students played a major role in this victory, which not only increased the total funding, but directed money to address the shortage of health workers and began the process for abolishing the discriminatory HIV+ Travel ban. In June, when the PEPFAR legislation was stalled, students swung into action and held rallies in DC, Chicago and Boston calling on Congress to get the bill moving. In Boston students delivered a Global AIDS Superhero award to Senator Kerry to thank him for his support and urge him to use his legislative superpowers to get the bill moving again.

Senator Kerry sent us a message, thanking the students for their work on passing PEPFAR.

Thank you for awarding me a SuperHero Award for my work on the Hyde/Lantos U.S. Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria Reauthorization Act of 2008 (S. 2731). I am deeply honored by your recognition and the award has a special place in the office. As you know, on July 16th we were successful in passing the PEPFAR reauthorization bill in the Senate and it should be on the President’s desk any day now. It is with your support and recognition of the importance global coordination in the fight against AIDS that we were able to win. I was particularly pleased that the bill included my provision tooverturn the travel and immigration ban in HIV positive individuals.This policy was discriminatory with no public health rationale and I am glad to have played a part in eliminating this draconian law.

This is an amazing recognition, directly from a policy maker, of your power as health professional students to advocate for the right to health. 

On November 4, Americans through out the country will participate in democracy by voting for 1/3 of the Senate, all of the House of Representatives and a new President. In order to effectively advocate for the right to health, you must also participate in the political process and exercise your right to vote.  And the first step to doing that is making sure you are registered to vote!

If you have not registered to vote you can click the red button here and make sure you are heard on election day. If you are already registered, use the share this button below to let friends, classmates and colleagues know how easy and important it is to be registered. PHR has partnered with the New Voters Project to hold non-partisan voter registration drives at several campuses throughout the US.  Contact me for more information on how your chapter can get involved.   

Here is a great example of PHR Student Chapter work on health and human rights education! Christopher Boyle, the former Columbia PHR Chapter President, wrote the following press release, describing the student forum that the Columbia Chapter held last year.

The Columbia P&S Student Forum on Global Health and Human Rights was created with the goal of supplementing the current Columbia P&S medical school curriculum with pertinent and exciting topics in global aspects of human rights, public health and social medicine. Additionally, because students from each of the four schools at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) have very relevant experience on these issues, but from very different perspectives, an additional major goal has been to provide an opportunity for students from each of these four schools to come together and talk, something that their curriculums rarely allow them to do.

This year, the inaugural year of the course included eight events on four topics, chosen based on student interest, and included discussions on whether access to health care constitutes a human right, HIV/AIDS, forced migration/refugee health and local issues in health and human rights. The format of the course included two events on each topic, one a journal club style discussion where two students led a discussion based on an assigned journal article, followed by a second event, a lecture from an expert in the field a week or two later. Lecturers this year included Dr. Scott Hammer MD, Professor of Public Health at Mailman and Division Chief of Infectious Diseases at CUMC and Dr. Ronald Waldman MD, MPH Founder and former director of the Program on Forced Migration at Mailman School of Public Health and sitting member on Board of Directors for PHR, as well as others.

The response to the course was overwhelming and far exceeded expectations. There were nearly 200 students who enrolled in the course with attendance at each of the events exceeding fifty people, and with one event drawing more than 100 participants. While the largest majority of students at the events were medical students, many students from all of the four schools were represented at every event and each included even a few undergraduate students. “I think we really tapped into something. Many more students than we even imagined were interested in these issues and I think this project has provided a valuable and exciting outlet outside of class to get together and talk about these very important issues,” says Chris Boyle, PHR president and member of the P&S class of 2010, who together with his classmate, Dan Schnorr, co-founded the project. In addition to receiving overwhelming student interest many groups on campus have come together to fund the course, which in total has raised $2000, money that has been used to pay for printed syllabi for each student, as well as paid for food and drinks at each event.

Note: the Columbia chapter has agreed to share its course outline with other PHR students who are interested in getting involved in the Health and Human Rights Education Project. We’ll be posting course outline with our outher HHR ED Project materials soon.

Hello all.

I wanted to write you a brief note before you start the summer. I’m bet many of you have amazing projects lined up for the summer. Speaking of amazing I want to just let you know that your work for PHR as activists and messengers is also amazing. I am not sure if you fully appreciate the depth of how powerful the message is when it comes from medical and other health professional students. Your work on our Health Action AIDS Campaign and Darfur Survival Campaign really helps save lives: it is that real, and I want to say thanks. And after you graduate, human rights issues will need your continued involvement.

Medical students in Zimbabwe, who have heard about your accomplishments, have requested our assistance to found an organization similar to the PHR Student Program. These students will now have a platform to help them respond to the human rights crisis engulfing Zimbabwe. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery—you are rightly recognized .

Now that I have been here a half a year, I finally have some time to visit with your chapters. Next year when I am on the road, which is often, I would like to come by and meet or grab dinner with your chapters and talk about what is happening at PHR in a more personal way. I’ll even buy the food!

I hope that things are already set for your Chapter to take off running next fall. Have a great summer. If you are in Cambridge, please come by the office and stop in to say hi.

PS. I look forward to seeing all of you at the national conference next year.

The Student Program would like to congratulate those chapters who have be been involved in Health and Human Rights education and share highlights of some of their activities. Incorporating a health and human rights framework in an academic setting promotes a rights-based culture in the health professions and helps students become better informed and effective advocates.

Here are some examples of HHR education on some of the campuses:

• Washington University in St. Louis - credit-based Health & Human Rights elective
• Columbia - Student Forum on Global Health & Human Rights (non-credit 8 week elective)
• Loyola - working to have an office for global health service and education available for the med school
• Drexel- creating a Global Health track for curriculum
• Brown- working on a global health and human rights elective now; provided a refugee health symposium in conjunction with existing classes (this year was successful, looking to replicate it for the next)
• VA Commonwealth University – created the elective, Cultural Competency, Health and Human Rights (which had the highest attendance of all electives); also created a HHR library within their formal library
• Tufts – currently at the table of a Tufts Med overall curriculum evaluation and reform
• George Washington - planning to have HHR components formalized, including in clinical
• U of MI – currently have a regularly scheduled faculty/student taught HHR round table; in the process of exploring to convert this into an elective
• Cornell – created a Social Medicine Reading Group (weekly, non-credit activity) for reading articles and having group discussions on writings about structural violence
• Johns Hopkins – hosted their annual health and human rights educational conference

PHR’s HHR ED Project is a vehicle for institutional change and developing an understanding of what it means to be an informed and aware health care provider. When I am asked, “Why does human rights education belong in the medical school?” I cannot answer any better than Patrick, a Tuft’s PHR member, who said:

Health goes beyond [a] working heart, lungs, and limbs. Health entails, and is impacted by, everything that a person encounters. As a future health professional, I can see no way to address medical problems without addressing the social, economic, and political issues that impact humans.

If you want to learn more about any of the projects listed above or how to get your school involved in health and human rights education, email me.

Over 200 students, faculty and health providers, a member of congress and members of the community gathered Monday at the University of Minnesota for a Town Hall meeting about the continuing AIDS epidemic. This event was put on by the Student Chapter of PHR at the University of Minnesota with lots of help from Health Action AIDS Campaign staff at PHR and the Minnesota AIDS Project, a local HIV/AIDS advocacy organization. The speakers truly bridged the local and the international and called on the audience to continue to be active in continuing to advance the AIDS movement. The key themes that came out of the event included:

• the epidemic is far from over, even with advances in anti-retroviral therapies alone
• that women are increasingly disproportionately affected by the disease
• a nuanced solution to the problem of the health care worker shortage will be necessary
• the epidemic continues to be shrouded in stigma
• even here in the United States we are not providing appropriate care for HIV to everyone infected and affected.

We met over lunch at the Mayo Auditorium at University of Minnesota Medical School. We led off with remarks from our Assistant Dean who supported us through this whole event. Following that, we welcomed the Honorable Betty McCollum (D-4 MN) a member of congress who in just a few terms in the house has become a leader in global health, and chairs the Congressional Global Health Caucus. She stressed the comprehensive nature of the response we must have to the global epidemic and that we need to have a response that is free of ideology.

Donna Barry, of Partners In Health, spoke about the comprehensive model of care that her organization is building in sites around the world. She stressed how important it is not to get complacent in the face of the success of HAART for those who are able to access it.

Omobosola Akinsete, a local AIDS doctor, spoke passionately about the disproportionate effect that AIDS continues to have on women, especially women of color and especially immigrant women right here in Minnesota’s sizable African-born refugee and immigrant population. She also talked about how significant the stigma is surrounding the disease and how this really hampers the ability to meet the issues of these patients.

Keith Henry, another well known local AIDS doctor with extensive clinical research in treating the disease, spoke about how much the disease has changed with new treatments but also how much there is left to do to provide treatment to various populations and overcome stigma to provide better care.

The questions from the audience were really amazing and we had local docs and people living with HIV as well as students all asking questions.

It was really key to have the support of the local Minnesota AIDS Project, who were able to connect us with the community groups here and also played a key role in helping us get the Congresswoman to the event. Partnering with local community organizations can really make an event much better.

Working with PHR was also key; the national office helped us plan the event and line up other speakers and helped us fund it too. The extensive cooperation among MAP, the Health Action AIDS Campaign and our chapter was really what made this event a success.

Charlie is a MS3 at University of Minnesota School of Medicine and former coordinator of the PHR chapter.

UPDATE:
The PHR website now has a page with more details, photos and media coverage generated from the event.

(Intro, Parts 2, 3)

Know. Inaction often stems from ignorance of the problem. Most student leaders tell me that they do not know where to start with organizing Darfur-related events because they do not feel that they know enough about what is going on there themselves.

If you are at a university, there is a speaker somewhere within a five-mile radius who could give a great talk about the intricacies and history of the conflict in Sudan. A great way to start off a week of action is with a prominent speaker explaining just what is going on, who the key players are and what is currently being done (or not being done) by parties such as the United States, the United Nations and the African Union.

Great speakers can be found at your respective ethics and philosophy departments, political science departments, African Studies departments, sociology, anthropology and international relations departments. Search the faculty of those areas and see who might fit the bill. Write a formal email inviting the person to speak.

Need suggestions on how to invite them? Just let us know, and we’d be more than happy to help you draft a letter. If you are comfortable speaking about current events in Darfur, but do not have a PowerPoint set up with maps, figures, etc., let us know and we can supply you with that as well. All you need to do then is reserve a room at your school and advertise the talk via email, posters and pre-class announcements.

Last year at Dartmouth, we had a student speaker, and we brought in a professional speaker from outside the community, Karen Hirschfield of PHR. For the student talk, Crandall researched the basic facts about Darfur and then created a short seven-slide PowerPoint to accompany his talk (let us know if you’d like a copy). After giving his fifteen-minute easy-to-follow presentation of the conflict in Sudan, we showed a film about Darfur, which lead to a great discussion amongst the audience members. Karen’s talk was then aimed at educating not just local students but also members of the greater Dartmouth and Hanover communities. People from all disciplines and backgrounds came to the talk and listened to Karen explain exactly where the conflict stood at that point in time and what was on the horizon.

Between Crandall’s historical talk and Karen’s up-to-the-minute analysis of current events in Darfur, we were able to educate a wide variety of people on what was going on.

Based on discussions within our leadership and with other students, the University of Michigan chapter of Physicians for Human Rights felt that many of our peers wanted to learn more about Darfur, so we decided to hold our second Health and Human Rights Roundtable on Darfur (our first Roundtable was on the basics of health and human rights).

We invited two speakers with different areas of expertise to speak about the conflict during the medical students’ one hour lunch break. Our first speaker was Amal Fadlalla, who was born in Sudan and is an assistant professor of women’s studies and Afro-American and African studies at the University of Michigan. She gave us some historical background, commented on media representations of the conflict, and discussed some of the complexities of the current situation. Our second speaker was a fellow classmate, Ted John, who spent a year in Darfur as an aid worker. Ted spoke to us about his experiences, the situation on the ground, and his reflections while working there.

I believe that our speakers really made the event a success, as we had a balance of academic and practical perspectives. Thanks to the Global REACH program and the Student Alliance for Global Reach, we were able to provide lunch for the seventy-five people that attended.

If I could go back and plan this event again, I would work more closely with the speakers to ensure that the discussion is tailored to the audience’s interests and level of knowledge. This is a challenge with any event, as there will be some attendees who are very knowledgeable and some who have very little knowledge about the topic being discussed. I would also remember to bring my camera to take photos.

I encourage PHR student leaders to spend time looking and asking around about students, staff, and faculty who have personal, professional, or research experience with the topics the chapter would like to present. Networking takes patience and perseverance, but it really pays off in the tremendous quality of a discussion led by engaging, informed speakers.

Please contact me if you have any questions about our activities or would like to collaborate on projects and events in the future: smparikh at umich dot edu

Sujal Parikh, MS I, is President of the University of Michigan chapter of Physicians for Human Rights.