Publications by authors named "Vanessa Kerry"

Background: Emerging infectious diseases like the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) pose significant global public health threats. Uganda has experienced multiple EVD outbreaks, the latest occurring in 2022. Frontline healthcare workers (HCWs) are at increased risk, yet there is insufficient evidence of existing knowledge of EVD of these HCWs.

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Background: Emerging infectious diseases like the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) pose significant global public health threats. Uganda has experienced multiple EVD outbreaks, the latest occurring in 2022. Frontline healthcare workers (HCWs) are at increased risk, yet there isn't sufficient evidence of existing knowledge of EVD of these health workers.

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Uganda experienced 2 COVID-19 waves that challenged health professional education. All health professions training institutions (HPTIs) in Uganda closed in March 2020. Cognizant of the threat to quality education and the frontline workforce, the National Council for Higher Education (NCHE) and Seed Global Health partnered to examine the risks and benefits of HPTI reopening through the Safe Schools Initiative (SSI).

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Introduction: Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a significant cause of morbidity and mortality in the Caribbean as well as globally. Within the Caribbean, the prevalence of TBI is approximately 706 per 100,000 persons - one of the highest rates per capita in the world.

Research Question: We aim to assess the economic productivity lost due to moderate to severe TBI in the Caribbean.

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Background: Rheumatic Heart Disease (RHD) continues to cause suffering and premature deaths in many sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries, where the disease is still endemic. RHD is largely preventable and determining its community burden is an important critical step in any RHD prevention program.

Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study of 5-16 years old pupils from 11 primary schools participating in an RHD prevention program in 4 districts in Tanzania, between 2018 and 2019.

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The operational cleavage between the US public health and medical care systems contributed to the country's difficulty in containing community spread of COVID-19 in the pandemic's first months. We provide an overview of the independent evolution of these two systems, drawing on case examples and publicly available outcome data, to demonstrate how three fundamental elements of epidemic response-case finding, mitigating transmission, and treatment-were undermined by the lack of coordination between public health and medical care and how these gaps contributed to health disparities. We propose policy initiatives to address these gaps and facilitate coordination across the two systems: build a case-finding diagnostic system to quickly identify and mitigate the emergence of health threats in communities, develop data systems that facilitate the transfer of critical health intelligence from medical institutions to public health departments, and establish referral pathways for public health practitioners to connect people with medical services.

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Objective: Sierra Leone has one of the highest maternal mortality and infant mortality rates globally. We share findings from a Midwifery Clinical Training Needs Assessment, conducted in 2021 as a collaboration between the Government of Sierra Leone and Seed Global Health. The assessment identified existing needs and gaps in midwifery clinical training at health facilities in Sierra Leone from various stakeholders' perspectives.

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Introduction: Over two million stillbirths and neonatal deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa (sSA) annually. Despite multilateral efforts, reducing perinatal mortality has been slow. Although targeted pathologic investigation can often determine the cause of perinatal death, in resource-limited settings, stillbirths, early neonatal deaths, and placentas are rarely examined pathologically.

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Despite major setbacks to its health infrastructure and health workforce capacity, Liberia began its first post-graduate training program for physicians in 2013. Specialty training in Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, General Surgery and Obstetrics and Gynecology were the four inaugural Residency programs that recruited graduates from the country's only medical school, A.M.

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Despite the exponential growth of global health partnerships (GHPs) over the past 20 years, evidence for their effectiveness remains limited. Furthermore, many partnerships are dysfunctional as a result of inequitable partnership benefits, low trust and accountability and poor evaluation and quality improvement practices. In this article, we describe a theoretical model for partnerships developed by seven global health experts.

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Academic medical centers have historically been defined by scientific discovery for health advancement. However, the mounting challenges of modern medicine are fueled by the social, economic, and political determinants of health that predict vulnerability and accelerate poor outcomes. To surmount looming threats to health, the academic medical mindset must equally prioritize social engagement-work that directly addresses the systemic social causes of health and illness-alongside the traditional pedagogy of laboratory-based, translational, and clinical research.

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Several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (3, 16, 17) point to the need to systematically address massive shortages of human resources for health (HRH), build capacity and leverage partnerships to reduce the burden of global illness. Addressing these complex needs remain challenging, as simple increases in absolute numbers of healthcare providers trained is insufficient; substantial investment into long-term high-quality training programs is needed, as are incentives to retain qualified professionals within local systems of care delivery. We describe a novel HRH initiative, the Global Health Service Partnership (GHSP), involving collaboration between the US government (President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief [PEPFAR], Peace Corps), 5 African countries, and a US-based non-profit, Seed Global Health.

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Background: Global neurosurgery encompasses the social and surgical practices that effect the neurologic health of vulnerable and underserved populations in domestic and international resource-limited settings. Formal academic engagement in global neurosurgery is limited in residency programs. Here we explore the current status of global neurosurgery education in residency programs across the United States.

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Motivated by interest in enhancing their clinical experience and contributing to communities in need, US medical resident physicians are increasingly keen to train abroad. Guidelines are needed to help ensure that trainee, institutional, and faculty engagement in global health is ethically appropriate and mutually beneficial for all involved. Supported by the nonprofit organization Seed Global Health, the WWAMI-University of Malawi/College of Medicine partnership leverages long-term US faculty to structure rotations for Malawian and American trainees and endorses strong onboarding, monitoring, and evaluation practices and a mutually beneficial bidirectional international partnership and exchange model.

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This is a brief review of puerperal (post-partum) psychosis and contains a case report of Donkin Psychosis, an unusual form which is associated with pre-eclampsia, from Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi. It includes considerations for treatment of Donkin Psychosis, in particular. It is the first reported case of Donkin Psychosis from Africa, to our knowledge.

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Integrating point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) to enhance diagnostic availability in resource-limited regions in Africa has become a main initiative for global health services in recent years. In this article, we present lessons learned from introducing POCUS as part of the Global Health Service Partnership (GHSP), a collaboration started in 2012 between the U.S.

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Background: The Joint External Evaluation (JEE) is part of the World Health Organization's (WHO) new process to help countries assess their ability to prevent, detect and respond to public health threats such as infectious disease outbreaks, as specified by the International Health Regulations (IHR). How countries are faring on these evaluations is not well known and neither is there any previous assessment of the performance characteristics of the JEE process itself.

Methods: We obtained JEE data for 48 indicators collectively across 19 technical areas of preparedness for 55 countries.

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