$$News and Reports$$

Aug. 30, 2015
Twenty-eight students from around the world took part in a special course this summer at BGU. The month-long course, entitled “Health and Ethics in the Age of Globalization,” attracted students from India, the US, China and Singapore.

 

BGU_4229.jpg

The course, in collaboration with the Medical School for International Health, was organized by Prof. Nadav Davidovitch, Chairman of the Department of Health Systems Management of the Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management, Dr. Anat Rosenthal, Dr. Yinon Shenkar, and Dan Weksler. It also hosted the following guest lecturers: Prof. Mark Clarfield, Director of BGU's Medical School for International Health, Prof. Michael Yudell of the School of Public Health, Drexel University, Prof. Paul Brandt Rauf and Prof. Sherry Brandt Rauf of the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. 

The course offered an enriching blend of lectures, field trips and a weeklong internship with an Israeli NGO, according to Kim Greenberg, 32, a Master's of Public Health student focusing on disaster relief at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She heard about the program through Dr. Nora Gottlieb, who got her PhD at BGU and did her post-doc at UIC last year, and also taught part of the course. 

“The comparative analysis of the situation in different countries was very interesting,” Greenberg said.

Zaeen De Souza, 21, an Economics major at Symbiosis International University in Pune, India, enjoyed the course's focus on health, economic disparity and inequality. 
“Hearing first-hand how medical professionals set priorities on the ground was fascinating. Nadav talked about sending mobile clinics into the West Bank. As an outsider, that was most interesting to me,” he said.

De Souza added that exposure to the health situation of Bedouins reinforced his understanding that “every country has those who are marginalized. If you look at the averages in Israel, it seems like everyone is well off health-wise. But the average does not give the whole picture,” and that is an important lesson to remember.

Both Greenberg and De Souza praised their teachers for their intelligence, breadth of knowledge and approachability.
“They always have answers to every question,” Greenberg said. De Souza added that classes were often very interactive with lots of questions and answers flowing back and forth, and multiple perspectives voiced. He also appreciated the Journal Club, time set aside each week to discuss a journal article that had been assigned to them.
The instructors also benefited from the opportunity to teach such a diverse group of students. According to Prof. Nadav Davidovitch, the course's organizer, "The option to teach in a multidisciplinary and multicultural atmosphere created an amazing opportunity for students to interact. I myself learned a lot from the students, from their previous experiences and wisdom. The ability to compare between countries and to see how both the global and local contexts matter were important lessons that I am sure all of us are going to take back to our public health work."

For their internships with various NGOs, the students had to prepare a brief featuring a literature review and analysis that will serve the organizations in the future. "The students' practicum work had an important value for the organizations, dealing with a variety of case studies, ranging from brucellosis prevention to tobacco taxation policies," said Prof. Davidovitch. The students interned at Physicians for Human Rights, Brit Olam, the Israel Medical Association, and more. Two of the students worked with MSIH, critically assessing MSIH's curriculum in comparison with other medical schools' Global Health programming.