Heart to Heart

The ICHA Blog

Bruce Adams, Ph.D. originally hails from New Brunswick, Canada. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher studying the genes that control insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas at the Diabetes Center at the University of California, San Francisco. He volunteers with programs that teach science lessons in the San Francisco public school system. He has also been involved with the American Diabetes Association’s Tour de Cure bicycling event over the last few years.

ICHA’s Ghana outreach is Bruce’s first experience as a global health educator. As someone who loves the outdoors and an avid runner, Bruce does not take for granted his good health and hopes to help in promoting life-style changes to benefit the health of others.

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Exercise, Ghana Style by Bruce Adams on October 10, 2009 | 0 comments

Hold that jump rope

As an avid runner, before leaving San Francisco for Ghana I was trying to accommodate my running ‘habit’, and bought some helpful aids to maintain my cardiovascular fitness. I decided the main way for me to keep aerobic fitness was to bring a jump rope. Mostly I was really sure if opportunity and the specifics of the area would be conducive to running. However, on Tuesday morning I finally had my virgin run on the TransAfrica Highway. An early a.m. run before it got too warm and while there was still some early cloud cover allowed me to finish about 8 miles. I have had a couple of other shorter runs, including a set of 4 x 800s (roughly) and another 6-7 mile run on Friday. The diesel from the trucks and cars is pretty nasty to be breathing along the road, so that makes it a little unpleasant. And the other day running I saw goatkill… there are lots of goats wandering everywhere, and I suppose such an incident is inevitable with all the speeding cars.

 

World Heart Day in Cape Coast

We got up at 5 a.m. Saturday morning in time to join our partners in reducing cardiovascular risk from the Elmina Health Clinic to attend World Heart Day activities (mainly a walk) in the nearby city of Cape Coast. Hundreds of mostly young people sang the walkers through a loop of Cape Coast; including the locations where President Obama spoke when he visited with his family this past summer. The day was finished with some time at the market, a tour of Elmina Castle to learn more details about a central player in the gruesome Trans-Atlantic slave trade.  The day finished on a more light note, sharing time with new friends (ICHA colleagues) and going for a swim at a great beach west of Elmina...

 

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Snippets of Early Impressions by Bruce Adams on October 4, 2009 | 2 comments

EUHC is not a local dish

The Elmina Urban Health Clinic is bigger than I imagined, but luckily so. Patients fill the open air waiting room and line up very early in the morning. Clinicians begin seeing patients shortly after 9 a.m. And although physically bigger, the facility is very basic in resources and equipment.  There is a dispensary onsite that has basic medicines in limited quantities. Furthermore, malaria is prevalent in Elmina and surrounding communities. Consequently malaria consumes a lot of the time and resources of the health care staff. As a result, non-communicable diseases can find it hard to be a priority on a patient chart. But that is why the ICHA can have such a big impact here. To be here and to identify the practical constraints and opportunities has added the extra challenge of on-the-spot troubleshooting of draft frameworks to conform to the cultural and practical medical norms at the clinic. The opportunities more than offset the constraints and everyone is excited as our plans start to be implemented with the help of the local people. The staff has been incredibly welcoming and accommodating during our first week here. This is all the more remarkable given the huge patient load with which they are dealing. 

 

 

A national health insurance program

Ghana started a national health insurance program a few years ago. It’s interesting to learn about the program and discuss its impact on people, particularly the poor, which are served at the clinic in Elmina. It’s also a timely conversation for those of us living in the US, as the topic is largely dominating the political landscape at home. From what I have gathered, Ghanaians between 18 and 60 can buy the national health insurance for 15 cedis (around 11 USD) per year. 

Choose your competition

Although opponents in the US to a single government-run choice in national health care insurance, I was reminded that the tolerance for competition is also cultural… For example, mobile phones in Ghana typically carry two or three SIM cards, allowing the user to optimize service opportunities, but also, choose the service provider with the cheapest rates in an area of service when service areas overlap. To me, this sounds like a more competitive system than the one we use in the US and Canada in which a consumer is left with whatever service the provider offers after signing a service ‘contract’ (the cost of which to break said contract can cost easily 10-15 times what national health insurance costs for one year in Ghana). So it would seem different countries and cultures have different tolerance levels for market ‘competition’ depending on the product in question.

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Beyond the lab bench by Bruce Adams on August 30, 2009 | 3 comments

Originally from New Brunswick, Canada, my graduate science education and training across Canada eventually led me to San Francisco, where I work as a postdoctoral researcher in the Diabetes Center at the University of California. I come to know about with ICHA through a friend who is also volunteering. The spirit and values of this budding outreach program is a big draw for me. It’s an opportunity to blend my long-term interest, research, and fundraising activities in the biology of communicable diseases, and my growing interest in health and science education.

 

 

I am excited about learning about, and learning from, Ghanians. They are known for their friendliness, rich culture and history. I am particularly keen on this opportunity to work with health-care and community workers in Elmina, a coastal fishing community. As a bench scientist I believe I have much to learn from, and contribute to, outreach projects. Beyond the value of training paths focused on developing clinician-scientists (MDs who also are also active researchers), I believe there is a vast reserve of untapped potential in basic health-science researchers (of the Ph.D. variety), of which I am one.  We can contribute to, and benefit from, involvement in outreach projects because of our background in forming research questions, collecting and analyzing data, and health education, particularly in underserved communities worldwide, including Africa. I have little doubt that witnessing and managing the practicalities and challenges for health education, and application of treatments for cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, can go a long way towards influencing our perspectives and future approaches in research.

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