By Erin Jester
Every minute counts in an emergency, and University of Florida College of Public Health and Health Professions students recently had a unique opportunity to help bystanders make those minutes count.
To bolster community-level emergency response preparedness, PHHP and other UF students and faculty joined forces with the UF Center for African Studies and Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra, Ghana, to develop tools to teach people how to “be the help until help arrives.”
From January to June, the Virtual Exchange for Public Health, housed in the Center for African Studies, paired UF students with medical students and clinicians at Korle-Bu to design information campaigns, educational materials and training sessions covering topics such as CPR, choking, fire safety, bleeding control and basic burn care.
While Americans in urban areas can expect emergency responders to arrive within minutes of a 911 call, in Accra, the capital and largest city in Ghana, the response time can be half an hour or more. Bystanders with training in basic life support skills can mean the difference between life and death.
Korle-Bu medical students first identified the most pressing public health information needs in the community, then worked in groups with UF students to create materials geared toward a variety of age groups and situations.
“I think that it’s important for students to interact more with different contexts,” said Daniel Acosta, Ph.D., a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Environmental and Global Health and affiliate faculty member of the Center for African Studies. “We often think of our differences, but what’s often more surprising is the amount of similarities we have with other countries.”
Master of Public Health student Kiara Shaw was part of a team focused on fire safety in primary schools, developing fire evacuation procedures, graphics explaining how to use fire extinguishers and guidance for how to treat small cuts and burns.
“This experience was an eye-opener, allowing me to learn about the different school systems and cultures from the medical students in Ghana,” she said. “Being part of an interdisciplinary team where everyone brought different perspectives was amazing.”
Appropriately tailoring the content to the culture was a significant part of the project, said Jenna Cavanaugh, a combined Bachelor of Public Health/Master of Biostatistics student who volunteered for the project after hearing about it in her Global Public Health course taught by Acosta — for example, using “Down Flat” by Ghanaian singer Kelvyn Boy as a reference for the tempo of CPR chest compressions instead of “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees.
“It was really cool to see that cross-cultural contact,” Cavanaugh said. “A big part of public health is knowing your audience.”
In her research for creating infographics, B.P.H. student Jocelyn Padron noticed most of the materials she encountered featured white and fair-skinned individuals, which doesn’t match the general demographic of Accra.
“I learned the importance of representation and culture when it comes to disseminating public health and emergency material,” she said. “The representation of individuals when creating infographics is vital to how they will internalize the information.”
The volunteer pilot program was conceived by UF Center for African Studies director Miles Larmer, Ph.D.; Torben Becker, M.D., Ph.D., M.B.A., an associate professor and vice chair of the College of Medicine’s Department of Emergency Medicine; and Nana Serwaa Quao, MBChB, M.P.H., a research and academic coordinator for Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital’s Accident and Emergency Center and courtesy clinical professor in UF’s College of Medicine.
In the long-term, Acosta said the group hopes to make the virtual exchange an annual for-credit project, adding a study abroad component in Ghana during the summer.
Working with students and clinicians in other parts of the world is valuable training for UF public health students, he said.
“Exposing students to different cultures and different ways to do things prepares them to be more systems-thinkers,” Acosta said. “It’s more holistic. They’re more prepared to handle curveballs in the real world.”