Our vision is to enhance health equity through nursing. Nurses deliver care to eight of 10 people around the world and we want to elevate our incredibly important role in global health. Everything we do is through that lens.
We focus especially on expanding opportunities for our faculty, students and alumni. We create mechanisms for students to have experiential learning at global health sites. And we’ve created a number of dynamic, long-term job opportunities for our alumni. And we help faculty optimize their research efforts, which involves a lot of matchmaking: connecting nurse scientists with other researchers because nurses can and should be involved in shaping solutions.
We are also the School’s go-to group on anything having to do with global health across UCSF. We represent nursing on the UCSF global disaster assistance committee. I serve on the Institute for Global Health Sciences leadership committee and we’re involved with all kinds of efforts, including devising safety standards and protocols for students and faculty traveling overseas.
We also aim to foster nursing leadership in every possible content area, in every possible setting, so a year ago, we developed a signature program, GAIN, in which we offer intensive short courses, live on site, for 12 months at a time. The courses have a clinical focus of the site’s choosing, but more broadly, we also teach leadership, advocacy and how to do quality improvement. The site determines what they need and hire mentor-teachers who live on site and have the knowledge and skill set to implement the program. Recently, two major sites chose two superstar alumni from our program: Maria Openshaw, one of our midwifery graduates, is working in Malawi mentoring nurse-midwives in two hospitals and six surrounding health facilities to improve outcomes for women and babies during childbirth. Ella Harris, one of our public health graduates is leading a sustainability and telehealth project in a health facility in Autlán, Mexico.
I would also add that global health can be in the Tenderloin or in Tanzania, so pretty much everyone here is doing global health when they work with marginalized of populations. Our center is a resource for any faculty or student who wants to take an area of nursing expertise and apply it in an unfamiliar setting. There is a demand across the world for global health education and as a number one school of nursing, we have a responsibility to provide the partnership and expertise.
Kimberly Baltzell, RN, PhD, FAAN directs the UCSF School of Nursing’s Center for Global Health. As a research scientist with the UCSF Malaria Elimination Initiative (MEI), she focuses on Targeted Parasite Elimination studies in Swaziland and Namibia. She also conducts research in Malawi, focusing on diagnostics for malarial and non-malarial fevers. Her research is both qualitative and quantitative, with a particular interest in understanding how health workers make treatment decisions for patients in settings with limited diagnostic tools.