She sought out opportunities to conduct fieldwork wherever she could, and dedicated her vacation time to volunteering in underdeveloped communities around the world. I want to not only help solve public health challenges in the developing world, but to make sure that those solutions are sustainable.”Īs she pursued her postgraduate career, from a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Culture, Ethnicity, and Health to her current position as a professor in the Department of Nursing and chair of the Social Service Center at Pyeongtaek University in her hometown of Seoul, South Korea, she spent much of her time pursuing that goal. “I wanted to use the skills I’d learned at Michigan to help developed and underdeveloped countries become more equal,” Bae says. When Bae completed her doctoral studies at the U-M School of Public Health, where she studied the effects of acculturation on stress and depressive symptoms among different ethnic populations, she set out with a goal in mind: increasing health equality around the world. It’s costly and time-consuming, and something Rackham alumna and Barbour Scholar SeoHyun Bae (M.P.H. Because this limits opportunities for online trainings, most HEWs must travel to Addis Ababa, the national capital, for 30-day courses costing approximately $80 dollars per day-or roughly $43 million for the entire cohort each year. Since the inception of the HEP, child deaths in Ethiopia have been reduced by 67 percent, according to a United Nations study, and there have been significant increases in immunization and sanitary system and latrine usage, along with reductions in maternal mortality.ĭespite its successes, the HEP still faces significant challenges, among them the logistic and financial difficulties associated with training HEWs in a primarily rural nation with a sparse communication infrastructure. All women, there are more than 40,000 HEWs working throughout Ethiopia today, leading to significant improvements in healthcare. Modeled after the east African nation’s successful agricultural extension program, the HEP recruits and trains Health Extension Workers (HEWs) from local communities, or kebeles, in order to provide basic health services for much of the country’s almost 80 percent rural population. In 2004, Ethiopia set out to change that by creating the Health Extension Program (HEP). But achieving that goal has proved much more difficult, notably due to an acute shortage of physicians in developing countries. Raising the global standard of health and well-being by increasing access to primary health care in developing countries around the world has been the subject of much discussion among public health workers and scholars since the late 1970s.
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