Women's Global Health Is Focus of Special Global Health Event
During May, Einstein’s Global Health Center teamed up with Doctors without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) to co-host an international traveling event, “Because Tomorrow Needs Her” (BTNH), to raise awareness of issues concerning women’s health in developing nations.
The photo exhibit was on display through May 31. Images from the two events can be viewed in the gallery below. View the exhibit here.In poor and disadvantaged societies, including many of the 70 countries where MSF operates, women and children are often the first casualties of inadequate and failing healthcare systems. As a result of these inadequacies, a significant number of women suffer or die from medical conditions that might otherwise be preventable.
An estimated 800 women die every day of pregnancy-related complications alone —most in developing countries—due to lack of sufficient resources in the face of a continuous high demand. To help ameliorate the dearth of care available, many of the MSF clinics and hospitals in these countries are set up in remote locations where healthcare is difficult or impossible to access, and in some cases is solely provided by traditional healers.
BTNH highlights these issues, which include the need for access to emergency obstetric care, obstetric fistula prevention and repair surgery, safe abortion care, and medical and mental healthcare for sexual violence. The project emphasizes the importance of addressing these needs in order to save women’s and their children’s lives, to help survivors live with dignity and to offer them psychological care.
The photo exhibition features images taken by award-winning photojournalists in developing countries. There is also a book, a video, and a website documenting stories of both failures and successes in treating patients, including incidents when lives were saved, as told by MSF physicians and field workers.
“We wanted to keep the voice of the stories in the first-person as much as possible, so we have direct, immediate storytelling that anyone would respond to,” said Melissa Pracht, content editor for the project. “The idea was to reach as broad an audience as possible.”
On May 4, 2016, the photo exhibit and reception along “Main Street” in the Forchheimer building kicked off the Einstein event. A second reception on May 18, at the same location, preceded a panel discussion held in Robbins Auditorium, which featured MSF doctors and other field workers who offered their personal accounts helping to address women’s health issues abroad. The panelists included Einstein faculty members Drs. Darin Portnoy, and Lisa Nathan, each of whom collaborates with MSF. Denise Grady, of the New York Times served as the event moderator.
“By giving students and physicians at Einstein an insight into the work being done through these firsthand accounts, we hope to inspire those who can contribute,” said Jill Raufman, director of Einstein’s Global Health Fellowship Program and program manager of its Global Health Center. “The stories could encourage them to consider joining the worldwide efforts in finding solutions to some of the most pressing global health problems affecting women’s health.”
Photo Gallery
(To view slideshow of photo gallery, click on an image below; then move your mouse over the left or right margins to navigate.)
Posted on: Wednesday, June 15, 2016