One-third of U.S. university nursing programs did not integrate international health into their curricula as recently as 2007, according to Wipada Kunaviktikul, but the School of Nursing is not one of them.
The Nursing School kicked off its third-annual Global Health Reflections Week yesterday with a presentation by Kunaviktikul, a research fellow at Harvard University and a professor at Chiang Mai University in Thailand. She emphasized the importance of education and leadership in improving global health.
In her speech, Kunaviktikul also stressed the importance of engaging students across disciplines to improve health standards worldwide.
"We need to be aware of not just health. We have to combine in every discipline to solve the issues of global health," she said.
Kunaviktikul listed universal primary education, increased gender equality and a reduction in child mortality as aspects of global health that need to be improved.
"You may not see a lot in America, but in different parts of the world, we have a lot of poverty," she said.
Marjorie Muecke, assistant Dean for Global Health Affairs, highlighted Kunaviktikul's role in inaugurating Global Health Reflections Week this year.
"We like to have a speaker the first day who is going to make us think about something in terms of global health as a whole school community," Muecke said.
Global Health Reflections Week will also feature a symposium on transcultural and transnational research in nursing, an Indian dance performance and screenings of relevant films.
But its main goal, like Kunaviktikul's, is to develop nurse leaders and global health, Muecke said.
"Our policy for reaching out is to try to stem the brain drain of nurses around the world by increasing the capacity of nurses to provide quality care," Muecke said.
Students agreed with Kunaviktikul on the importance of working to equalize and improve health care globally.
Nursing sophomore Chelsea Motzel said she enjoyed the chance to look at global health from a different perspective.
"In our nursing school, they always talk about global health, but we never get to see it," Motzel said. "It was interesting to see that other schools have the same motives as us."
First-year nursing student Katy Baker-Cohen, who has previously studied abroad in West Africa, agreed.
"There are huge health disparities in the world, so it's important that we use what we have and spread our knowledge while we are at this university," she said.
