This post was written by second year student, Liz Charles. Liz interned this summer with the International Partnership for Innovative Healthcare Delivery (IPIHD) with the support of CASE’s Summer Internship Fund (learn more about SIF at the bottom on this post!)
Coming to business school with a clinical nursing background, I was hoping to transition into a career in global health. I spent the 2011 fall semester looking for opportunities to improve healthcare access, quality and affordability through business channels. After identifying someone with a job description that matched my interests, I would inquire about their career path to this point. The response often included the term “luck” or the phrase “I just fell into it.”
While luck isn’t the easiest career strategy to pursue, I did experience it when Richard Bartlett, the Associate Director of a global health NGO named the International Partnership for Innovative Healthcare Delivery (IPIHD), appeared on Fuqua’s campus to describe his project, a new partnership between Duke, McKinsey and the World Economic Forum. IPIHD identifies innovative health organizations and helps them grow, replicate and access funding through a system of network collaborations. His presentation caught my interest and in the spring of 2012 I applied to be their first intern.
For the summer, I was paired with One Family Health (OFH), an innovator engaged in creating a franchise network of nurse-owned clinics in Rwanda. The organization, a replication of a similar project in Kenya, had recently entered a public-private partnership with the Rwandan Ministry of Health to expand the public health’s system of health posts to over 500 within seven years.
The project pairing was perfect, allowing me to leverage my nursing background while also building upon my business skills. I was assigned four projects:
- Write a case study of the organization,
- Scope the feasibility of a Duke partnership in creating a health portal for the Rwandan Ministry of Health (to train healthcare workers),
- Develop a Monitoring and Evaluation proposal, and
- Consult OFH according to their needs.
The latter task tested my business skills as my responsibilities included creating marketing plans for franchisee recruitment and new clinic openings; creating training and compliance guidelines, forms and schedules; suggesting revisions to the recruiting process; enhancing the operations manual; and advising on newsletter strategy and metric tracking.
I spent the first few weeks of the summer preparing myself for the in-country experience. Guided by Gunther Faber (CEO of One Family Health), Richard Bartlett (IPIHD Associate Director), and Jeff Moe (Fuqua faculty), I delved into the projects, gathering information from written sources and interviews, and created a working document that described the health care landscape of Rwanda and One Family Health’s role within it. I scoped out Duke’s interest in the Health Portal and researched monitoring and evaluation methods. Throughout this process, I also learned about effective team dynamics, organizational leadership and healthy workplace communications.
Then, after an onslaught of vaccinations, I traveled to Rwanda. For three weeks I became part of the OFH team. During the day, I joined team meetings, scoped new clinic sites, assisted with drug deliveries and compliance checks, attended trainings and spent time in the health posts. Through a barrage of questions and observations, I collected the needed information to create a scholarly paper describing the OFH model and attempting to identify future challenges and pinpoint ways corporate sponsors could engage to help the organization grow. During the evenings I retreated to the guesthouse, where I mingled with other aid workers and completed my consultation projects.
The experience was invaluable in helping me understand the true meaning of global health, public-private partnerships and the role of business in the developing world. Involvement in a micro-financed model of delivery also helped me understand the importance of financial institutions, metrics for showing impact, and the cultural hurdles for implementing Western business practices in the developing world. Spending time in rural clinics, watching nurses administer care, exposed me to the complexities associated with low-level training, health worker shortages and limited resources, and helped me understand what my future role as a global health worker would look like.
The funding offered through the CASE Summer Internship Fund made it possible for me, as a mother of four, to lend my services to an organization that is making a difference by increasing global access to cost-effective and high quality healthcare. I appreciate the itchy whiskers my Fuqua classmates endured during Stache Bash and the donation of parts of their own summer salaries to help fund my summer internship, which I feel was a perfect match.
The Summer Internship Fund (SIF) enables first year Duke MBA-Daytime students to learn about the rewards and challenges of social sector management without making a significant financial sacrifice. In addition, the program enables organizations that otherwise could not afford to hire MBA student interns to benefit from students’ expertise. The SIF has supported more than 130 students, distributed more than $400,000, and helped to further the mission of many nonprofit and government organizations. Funds are raised through student fundraising and from donors who believe in the mission of the program. If you would like to contribute, you can donate online using your credit card.