On Saturday, February 25, 2017, Aid for Health held a training and orientation session for its annual health crisis simulation. The Global Health Education and Learning Incubator was invited to provide a general introduction to global health, and the Incubator’s pedagogy fellow, Anshul Kumar, presented for 75 minutes to a group of eight participants on the health conditions over time in a number of developed and developing countries. Included in this list was a fictitious country meant to illustrate the changes that a typical post-colonial developing country experiences or can expect to experience from 1950 to 2050.
Through the lenses of these countries over time, Kumar encouraged participants to view global health not only as sets of biological conditions impacting populations, but also as the underlying social, political, historical, economic, and environmental factors that impact health outcomes further “upstream.” Kumar took participants on a decade-by-decade tour of the changes in the disease profile of each country, while also introducing them to basic health measurement concepts, such as mortality and fertility rates, incidence and prevalence, and population size and growth.
Kumar explored how states of health are distributed within population groups, such as the rich and poor or the urban and rural. Participants engaged in discussions, activities, and active learning exercises to further reinforce these concepts.
The Aid for Health training was co-organized by Jessica Huang, who is serving as head online teaching fellow for “Global Health Challenges: Complexities of Evidence-Based Policy,” taught this spring by the Incubator’s faculty director Professor Sue J. Goldie. The simulation event will be held on March 25, 2017, and more information is available at the organization’s Facebook page.