UW News

April 16, 2009

Global health conference at UW creates a global buzz

UW Health Sciences/UW Medicine

What are the role of international nonprofits in Sudan, the ethics of short-term experiences abroad and the benefit of public interventions in global health? These were some of the hard questions being asked to leaders in global health at the Transcending Global Health Barriers: Education & Action conference held at the UW April 3-5.


Despite the competition from sunny weather and the frenzy over cherry blossoms, close to 1,000 participants filled the Husky Union Building for the three-day conference to discuss, debate and network on making the world a healthier, happier place.


“The conference was such a success there was buzz about it going national,” said Daren Wade, director of the UW Global Health Resource Center, which put on a student-run global health conference twice before, joined forces with the Global Health Education Consortium to make this year’s conference happen.


Wade said there was a lot of excitement about the places where people had traveled from, including a medical student from the University of Khartoum in Sudan, a delegation from Namibia, and Sylvia Montano, a speaker from Lima, Peru.

The conference featured keynote speaker Harriet Fulbright, director of the Fulbright Center, a nonprofit dedicated to peace and justice through collaboration. Fulbright’s husband, the late Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.), started the Fulbright scholarship program to “increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.”


When Ann Marie Kimball, a UW professor in health services, asked the audience how many people knew someone, including themselves, who had benefited from a Fulbright scholarship, there was a sea of hands. During the question and answer period, Harriet Fulbright excited people with talk about the peace index, which categorizes countries on how peaceful they are. United States ranks 97 out of 140 due mainly because of its large prison population, she said.

Saturday included a lively debate between Steve Gloyd with Health Alliance International and Chris Murray, director of the Institute of Health Metrics & Evaluation, on government’s role in public health interventions. The debate, moderated by Chris Elias, president of PATH, discussed the explosion of aid money flowing through U.S. nonprofits, which is creating a situation of “remarkably rich” NGOs and drastically underfunded ministries of health, said Gloyd.


The conference featured more than 44 breakout sessions on a wide range of global health topics, including public health interventions, clinical skills building, macroeconomics, workforce development and novel approaches using technology.


During the conference, the UW’s Department of Global Health created a conference central web page featuring live public text messages through Twitter, a photo stream on Flickr and several short video interviews with speakers and students. The page is continually being updated with more videos and stories.