Term 2 Ends, Jonathan Welcomes the Break

Whew! Today I attended my last public health class for a while as we put a close to Term 2 at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine earlier this afternoon, and boy am I glad. I need a bit of break.

You see just this morning and yesterday, I turned in two 30+ page reports--one on the cost-effectiveness of HAART (highly active antiretroviral treatment) for HIV/AIDS patients in South Africa (for my economic evaluation class) and another report examining the Duke University Health System medical mishap in which surgical instruments were mistakenly "washed" in hydraulic fluid (for my organizational management class). I really enjoyed these two classes during this half of the term.

Economic evaluation taught me valuable tools that health care officials use to value the "costs and consequences" of various health care interventions. Essentially, we learned the ways to measure the cost-effectiveness of various health care interventions which can commonly include drugs, health promotion programs, health education initiatives, or doing nothing...as that is always an option in the field of health. A lot of people don't particularly like economic evaluation or they think that valuation of such health care interventions is impersonal, but the reality is that health care systems the world over--regardless of provider structure or payment system--are feeling the synergistic squeeze of growing claims and dwindling resources. Therefore, it's important that health systems spend their money wisely and are able to get the best bang for their buck or pound or Euro or what have you.

Organizational management was another interesting class as we learned real-life methods on how to best manage health personnel, patients, and systems from a variety of health care executives and organizational leaders. For the major part of our assessment we had to take a health care-related organizational management problem from our lives and succinctly diagnose the problem, analyze the response, and offer recommendations for handling future similar problems. I choose to look at a recent problem encountered by Duke University Health System where the health care organization successfully weathered a very turbulent public relations storm after 3000+ patients were exposed to surgical instruments that had been mistakenly washed in hydraulic fluid instead of detergent. I really enjoyed this organizational management class, and this Duke case study in particular, because it's important to not only acknowledge when problems arise in health care but more importantly to be prepared to confront these problems head on.

Feel free to give either of these reports a browse as I'm very happy with them. The economic evaluation report on HAART for AIDS is here while the case study on the Duke hydraulic fluid incident can be found here.

Now, I look forward to enjoying a restful Easter weekend around London with some friends and then spend the upcoming week completing four more Rotary Scholar Talks before I head back home to Tennessee for a few weeks.