They found a lifeline to global health in their own backyard
Doctors, community organizers, faculty and students put global health strategies on center stage at the first Global Health Consortium on Northeastern University’s Oakland campus.
OAKLAND — The term “global health” might conjure up images of medical tents in tropical places. A train station with brutalist architecture in Oakland, California, may not fit that picture.
But there’s more than meets the eye at the city’s Fruitvale Bay Area Rapid Transit station.
Tiffany Rose Naputi Lacsado, chief program officer of The Unity Council, said the 34-year-old BART station was transformed in 2004 from acres of parking lots into a resource hub for its largely Latino immigrant neighborhood, offering access to vital resources like a senior center, health clinic, library, preschool, high school and law offices.
“When they’re trying to find their place in America, they come to places like Fruitvale,” said Lacsado, emphasizing that it was college students who partnered with The Unity Council in the early 1990s to create the mixed-use village for the immigrant Fruitvale community.
Lacsado was one of several local professionals who spoke at the first East Bay Global Health Consortium, which was held on Northeastern University’s Oakland campus on Saturday.
“Global health is both an international challenge and a local imperative,” said Northeastern Oakland Dean Dan Sachs, who attended the event, which drew 125 attendees, including doctors, community organizers, faculty and 60 first-year students interested in learning about global health strategies, both abroad and here in the United States.
Partnering with Kaiser Permanente East Bay and The Permanente Medical Group, Northeastern organized the daylong event with formal presentations, roundtable discussions and networking mixers at Lisser Hall and The Lorry I Lokey Graduate School of Business building. Northeastern associate clinical professor Maria Catrina D. Jaime was actively involved in the program.
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Jaime, whose mentorships with her Northeastern students focus on the importance of collaborating with community organizers, lined up a broad selection of speakers because she wanted to highlight that it takes everyone — not just doctors — to advance the goals of global health care.
“To be in community, learn from community and have the humility that you’re not supposed to know everything but you’re open to learn,” Jaime said. “That’s why it’s also important to work with community champions and leaders.”
The event not only exposed students to career paths in global health but also advanced the fundamental objectives of the university’s Bouve College of Health Sciences of improving patient outcomes and community wellness.
“That is always the goal,” said Caroline Hewitt, assistant dean for clinical affairs and partnerships on the Boston campus, who flew to Oakland to attend the event. “We’re trying to prepare a workforce that is skilled and educated and doing that work.”
First-year Northeastern student Xiaoyi Jiang, 18, from Atlanta, Georgia, volunteered as a note taker and at the registration table because she was inspired to learn more about global health after a family safari trip to Africa gave her a front row seat to disparities.
“I think everyone should have fair access to medicine,” she said, remembering the lack of available health care she saw in the tribal communities surrounding the big city of Nairobi.
Jiang, who is studying behavioral neuroscience, data science and chemistry, hopes to give immigrants and people in other countries better access to medicine through AI-powered drug development. Jiang said she met doctors on Saturday who were spearheading that kind of work abroad.
“It’s really great meeting the actual people who have the experience,” she said.
One of those doctors, Peter Le from Kaiser Permanente Northern California, had just returned from working at ChoRay Hospital in Saigon, Vietnam. The largest hospital in the country, Le began an ICU rotation there twenty years ago.
Born in Los Angeles, but self-described as “culturally Vietnamese,” Le outlined several obstacles he faced in starting an English language training program in 2016 for the Vietnamese residents he worked with on his missions, who didn’t have full access to cutting-edge medical literature and exchange programs because of their language barriers.
“We’re trying to develop doctors,” Le said, who encouraged the audience to both work with and around entrenched systems in different cultures to create meaningful collaborations with local health care professionals.
Sometimes, building those bridges takes a little creativity.
For example, Le persuaded ChoRay’s attending doctors with wine and boxes of candy to secure a conference room in the hospital to hold his English classes. He also enticed the residents, who are unpaid and often have other jobs to support themselves, with a free lunch if they showed up.
“We can see what works in a resource-poor environment,” he said.
When Le’s program was cancelled, he regrouped and decided to use his resources to rent a house nearby, offering the residents a place to live while they completed their residencies, shouldering some of their financial burden.
Another doctor, Scott Kaiser from Kaiser Permanente Northern California, spoke about his work with Operation Rainbow, a nonprofit started in 1978 that runs 12 to 14 missions a year in different countries, providing free orthopedic surgeries to children and young adults.
The decision to participate in these life-changing surgeries was a no-brainer for Kaiser, whose last trip was to Guatemala.
“I’m not an innovator,” he said. “I say yes. I show up. I get involved.”
That involvement doesn’t come without some ethical dilemmas, he admitted. With more families vying for the free services than they can handle, Kaiser sometimes has to make some hard choices. He developed an ethical system to choose his surgical candidates: Can their needs be met elsewhere, will there be low complication rates, will the post-operative care be simple and will the surgery offer the child a better quality of life?
He presented a case in which a child had hip dysplasia, a problem that — if left untreated — results in lifelong pain and a gait disorder.
Kaiser showed photos — ones that the families consented to share — of himself alongside recovering children, with Spiderman-themed bandages and big smiles, whose lives were forever improved because of Operation Rainbow.
“I have that direct impact with individuals’ lives,” he said. “And that’s enough for me.”
But it isn’t only the medical doctors who are making a difference in global health care — it was also attorneys, social workers, psychiatrists and educators in the field that were advancing health care on a global scale, in other countries and right here at home.
Naomi Adler, an emergency physician at Kaiser Permanente East Bay, helps immigrant patients seeking asylum write a medical affidavit, a document that requires an intensive four to five hours of exams, assessments and interviews.
One patient in particular stands out, she said: a woman with a history of sexual trauma, who was able to tell her story in the privacy of Adler’s exam room, rather than a court where she’d be in front of a large audience and cross-examined about painful memories.
“I was the first person she told these stories to,” said Adler.
The presentations culminated in students being paired up with doctors for roundtable discussions about career pathways. Moderated by Jaime, the students could rotate tables every 10 to 15 minutes, getting to as many doctors as possible, leading to potential internships, co-ops and experiential learning opportunities.
“It really was just an amazing day,” said Jaime. “The Bay Area is so diverse and there are opportunities to be doing global health work locally.”
