So you’re wanting to work in global health, but you’re not sure where to start.
In this video we’re going to talk about how you can identify your focus area of interest.
Hi, my name is Greg Martin.
This video forms part of a series of videos on careers in global health, and we are going to be looking at the following.
Firstly, how to identify your area of interest.
Secondly, understanding the possible roles you might play, and how it is that you are going to add value.
Thirdly, we are going to take a look at the essential skills that you are going to need to be effective in the global health space.
And, finally, we are going to take a look at the kinds of organisations that you can apply to for jobs.
So let’s jump in and take a look at how you can identify your area of interest.
Now, the reason that I’m starting with this is that global health is a composite discipline.
It’s not just one thing, and it’s just about impossible to be an expert in everything.
I like to divide these areas that you might want to be involved in into disease areas, exposures of interest, population groups, special issues, and disciplines.
At the end of this video, I am going to talk about how you can mix and match across these categories to find your niche,
and that’s going to help you understand how it is that you are going to add value, what skills you are going to need,
and what organisations you might want to look to for employment.
Let’s jump right in. Identifying your area of interest.
Now this could be disease specific, so let’s just have a look at a couple of diseases.
We are talking about HIV, TB, malaria, meningitis, influenza, polio eradication, neglected tropical diseases,
novel zoonotic infections like Ebola, SARS or MERS-CoV, cancer, cardiovascular disease, strokes, COPD, diabetes,
obesity, the surgical burden of disease, mental-health issues, malnutrition and many, many more.
Your area of interest might be an exposure of interest.
These are exposures that lead to diseases, things like tobacco, alcohol, radiation, food issues, high-caloric foods, salt, etc. etc.
Your area of interest might be a population group, and here we are talking about things like
maternal and child health, people living in poverty, displaced people, people living with disabilities, prisoners,
people living in low-income countries, urban populations, rural populations, and many, many more.
And, of course, it might be an issue. So here we are talking about emergency planning,
environmental health, complex humanitarian emergencies, access to medicines,
health-service improvement, vaccines, gender, equity and human rights, human resources for health,
healthcare financing, ITC for health, supply chain for diagnostics and treatments, trade and health,
climate change and health, bioterrorism, breastfeeding, e-health, the international health regulations,
the TRIPS Agreement, essential medicines, primary healthcare, reproductive health,
water and sanitation, food security, and the social determinants of health, and many, many more.
And, of course, you might be interested in one of the broad disciplines that feed into public health,
things like epidemiology, health economics, health policy, technology, health systems, education,
health promotion, health protection etc. etc. And, of course, many, many more.
Now, on the one hand you could dig deep and hunker down on any one of these disease areas or exposures
or population groups or issues or disciplines – and many people do.
However, in reality you’ll probably find that you land up developing an interest across these categories.
So you might be interested in, for example, health policy (which is a discipline)
and how it relates to the TRIPS Agreement (which is a special issue),
and how that affects access to HIV treatment (which is a disease area)
and how that applies to mothers and children (which is a population group).
So I hope you can see how these things might fit together.
I hope you have found this useful.
In the next video we are going to take a look at the possible roles you might play in the global health space.
I have got other videos on this YouTube channel that deal with careers in global health.
There’s going to be a link to a global health careers playlist in the description below,
and of course I’ve got teaching videos on epidemiology, ethics, finding and using data etc. etc.
So, please subscribe to this channel if you haven’t already. Thank you for watching.