University of Colorado Denver

Michael Hambidge, MD, ScD, Professor Emeritus, Department of Pediatrics, University of Colorado School of Medicine, is the principal investigator of this project. The objective of this project is to determine Zn absorption from bio fortified maize meal at different levels of fortification, the determine the effect of milling on bioavailability, to compare increase in Zn absorption for each group, and to utilize data derived from these studies to develop a trivariate model which will predict the effect of dietary Zn and phyate on the total quantity of Zn absorbed each day. This project is being conducted between May 2009 and April 2011.

 

Anita Duhl Glicken, MSW, Associate Dean, Physician Assistant studies, University of Colorado School of Medicine, and Director, Child Health Associate/Physician Assistant (CHA/PA) program has been working on an ongoing partnership with the Walter Sisulu University (WSU), located in Eastern Cape, South Africa. As one of the first physician assistant programs in the United States, the CHA/PA program at the University of Colorado School of Medicine was recently selected by the American International Health Alliance (AIHA) to partner with WSU. The 3-year Clinical Assistant (CA) program is needed to produce qualified practitioners who can assess patients, make diagnoses, prescribe treatments and undertake minor surgical procedures. Additionally, WSU leaders would like to develop a student exchange program so their students can come to Colorado and learn what it means to be a physician assistant. The program recruits 20 students a year from the local population.  Recruiting locally guarantees students can speak Xhosa, the local language. Often the region’s doctors are not from the local community so they find it hard to communicate directly with patients. CAs also have limited opportunities to work outside of their geographic area or country, which means they are more likely to be retained in the local health system.

 

 

Michael Hambidge, MD, ScD, Professor Emeritus, Department of Pediatrics, University of Colorado School of Medicine, is the principal investigator of this project. The broad objective of this proposal is to improve growth and health of infants and young children less than two years of age by improving the quality of complementary feeding.  The proposed interventions will compare the potential benefits of incorporating meat into routine infant and toddler feeding versus optimized traditional plant based complementary feeding regimens. This is a multi-country study, of which our site [Colorado-Guatemala] is the lead site in the current Complementary Feeding Project, the CBA Survey and the pending Preconception intervention. This project began in September, 2001 and will continue through April 2012.

 

Deborah Thomas, PhD, Associate Professor, Environmental and Occupational Health, University of Colorado Denver, is collaborating with local researchers to conduct this project. The University of Colorado Denver and the Department of Community Medicine at Bugando University College of Health Sciences in Tanzania have formed a collaborative partnership to build an area of concentration around health GIS and evidence-informed decision making, applying GIS as a research tool around a variety of projects, including HIV mapping in Misungwi District and disease mapping in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) focusing on malaria.

 

Blair Gifford, PhD, Associate Professor, International Health Management, Business School, University of Colorado Denver, is currently working on this four-year project. Funding for this project will be used to develop midwifery auxilliare vocational training at the Ecole Professional CAMEJO (EPC) in Leogane, Haiti.  Midwife auxilliare training is needed to combat the very high maternal and infant mortality rates in Haiti.  Recent efforts to develop midwife assistants and other health human resources, by organizations like Partners in Health in Haiti, have helped lessen maternal and infant mortality rates by up to 50% since 1999 in specified work areas. Haiti has the worst maternal health statistics of any country (630 deaths per 100,000 live births) in the Western hemisphere and among the worst in the world.  Prior to the quake, only a quarter of births were attended by trained personnel, compared with 98% of births in the neighboring Dominican Republic.  Experiences from Afghanistan and Partners in Health work areas in central Haiti have shown that investing in midwifery can significantly reduce maternal mortality, even under the harshest conditions.  Midwives are significantly less expensive to train and maintain than doctors; they can be drawn from local populations with low educational levels and as “local daughters;” and, they are more likely to be accepted and trusted by, and continue to serve, hard-to-reach rural communities.

Susan B. Rifkin, PhD, adjunct at the Colorado School of Public Health and a Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Social Psychology, at the London School of Economics has been working in collaboration of the National Health Systems Resource Center (Government of India) to implement a systematic review of community health workers using the ASHA scheme to assess the contribution of community participation and empowerment to the community health workers (women) and community people for improved health outcomes.

 

Myron Levin, MD, Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine, University of Colorado School of Medicine undertakes clinical research within the National Institute of Health (NIH)-supported clinical International Maternal Pediatric Adolescent Clinical Trials collaborative trials group (IMPAACT).  This involves vaccine trials of rotavirus vaccine in infants born to HIV-infected mothers and of HPV vaccine in HIV-infected adolescents.  IMPAACT has many opportunities to study the treatment of HIV in resource-poor countries, as well as infectious complications of HIV.  The current trials are in Botswana, Zambia, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe.  However, research opportunities exist in other African countries, as well as in Thailand, India, and Brazil.

 

Calvin L Wilson, MD, Associate Professor, Department of Family Medicine, University of Colorado School of Medicine, has been conducting this project since December 2006, and will continue until September 2012. Based in Kigali, Rwanda, Dr. Wilson is partnering with Tulane University and the National University of Rwanda in helping to strengthen their newly developed specialty residency programs, develop a new Family and Community Medicine residency program, and help to develop the teaching skills of their faculty. We also work with the Rwanda Medical Council to develop a national CME program for all physicians and dentists. There are currently two full-time UC faculty in Rwanda, and they are looking for more capable full-time family medicine teachers

Eric A F Simões, MB, BS, DCH, MD, Professor of Pediatrics, Section of Pediatric Infectious Disease at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Dr. Simões carried out many of the studies that provide the scientific foundation for the World Health Organization’s Integrated Case Management of Childhood Illness. He has been involved with this program for many years, initially with development of algorithms for acute respiratory infections and later on with helping develop the current Integrated Case Management of Childhood Illnesses algorithm and refining it.

 

Co-collaborators Deborah Thomas, PhD, Associate Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health at the University of Colorado Denver, and Renee King, MD, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine; University of Colorado School of Medicine, are working with other investigators to conduct a case study centered on the two main hospitals that serve the northern region of Haiti. Using semi-structured interviews and an analysis of organizational networks, the research: 1) examines what local health-related resources were available during and after the devastating earthquake of January 2010, 2) how these were, or were not, made use of in response efforts, and 3) the level of coordination and collaboration among health delivery groups with a particular focus on preparedness and recovery. This project is funded by the National Science Foundation.

Daniel Savin, MD, Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of Colorado School of Medicine is conducting this bipartite project. During the longitudinal experience the student will assist in coordinating an Internet-based educational exchange between University of Colorado and the University of Health Sciences in Phnom Penh. Activities will include teaching Cambodian Psychiatry Residents how to access and use free medical databases relevant to their theses. Students may assist their Cambodian counterparts by using databases available through the Health Sciences Library at the Anschutz Medical Campus. An interest in using technology to improve medical education and medical practice is essential. Estimated time commitment for this part of the project will be 2-5 hours per month for 2-4 years.

The funded experience will consist of a 1-2 month summer externship at the University of Health Sciences in Cambodia. Students would spend time with Cambodian counterparts at an outpatient psychiatric clinic in Phnom Penh and in an outlying province. There may be opportunities for clinical exposure to general primary care and to care for those affected by HIV/AIDS. The student would also assist residents in using online resources to access medical literature during their visit. The participating student will have the opportunity to complete his/her medical school requirement for completion of a scholarly activity related to this experience.

 

The NECTAR program is headed up by Thomas B Campbell, MD, Professor of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases/Department of Medicine, University of Colorado School of Medicine. This project will run from October 2010 until September 2015. Dr. Campbell is working with his colleagues at the University of Zimbabwe College of Health Sciences (UZCHS) on the Novel Education Clinical Trainees and Researchers (NECTAR) program.  NECTAR will transform medical education in Zimbabwe, a country experiencing a significant shortage of medical educators, and increase the quality and quantity of health care workers to meet the needs of a large underserved population.  The programs' goals are to: (1) Increase the number of medical students completing training at UZCHS to become doctors with expertise in local healthcare priorities; (2) Support and empower both new graduates and current faculty of UZCHS so they are well prepared to remain in Zimbabwe to practice, to conduct research, and to teach future generations of doctors; and (3) Develop researcher capactiy to address the priority healthcare needs of the region.

 

Stephen Berman, MD, FAAP, Professor of Pediatrics, University of Colorado, and Director of the Center for Global Health, Colorado School of Public Health, lead a collaboration among the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the Latin American Pediatric Society (ALAPE), and the Association for Health Research & Development (ACINDES) to develop a training program in disasters that considers the unique physical and psychological needs of children. The training increases the participants’ awareness and competence in pediatric disaster planning and response. The goal of the international program is to train a critical mass of pediatricians and other physicians and health professionals in developing countries to become involved in pediatric disaster planning for their hospitals and communities. The program now has 2 components; first, the establishment of successful national training centers throughout the world that hold additional courses in their countries and second, an ongoing formal evaluation to document the impact of the program and identify ways in which the materials and training can be improved and more successfully taken to scale.  The international program has established national training centers in Dohar, Qatar, Beijing, China, Ho Chi Min City, Vietnam, Mexico City, Mexico, Panama City, Panama, Lima, Peru and Quito, Ecuador. These centers have adopted a “train the trainer model” and are establishing regional training centers to disseminate the program broadly throughout their countries. Courses are planned this year for Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and the Philippines.  Course materials are now available in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Vietnamese. The manual can be found at: http://www.aap.org/disasters/peds.cfm

 

Jean Scandlyn, PhD, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Colorado Denver, is conducting this project in Bolivia; it is funded by the U.S. State Dept., Fulbright Scholar program. For three months each year for three years (2010-2012) Dr. Scandlyn will be residing in Bolivia, working with health-related Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs) both international and Bolivian, to help them develop skills and capacity in designing and completing research projects that use qualitative methods. In the first year, she led three workshops that produced 13 research proposals and projects that are on-going. 

 

Ted Ning, MD, and Connie Ning, MA, began this program in 2007, seeking to develop female leadership and economic productivity in Guatemala after 36 years of civil war there. In this program, primary school directors identify top performing students and select them to advance to junior high school (three years), with financial assistance offered by Starfish One by One. Utilizing a paid female Mayan mentor, the girls meet outside of school for 2-3 hours weekly to ensure scholastic success and to enhance other character building qualities, such as leadership training, environmental awareness, and personal health, among others. The second three years of this six-year program are designated to completing a high school education and becoming leaders in their community. Starfish One by One works with other non-profit and community women’s groups to create workshops and internships. The goal of the project is to create opportunities for the students to be economically productive in their communities, both supporting family finances and saving for a university education. Today there are 182 students in 12 groups in three separate sites, with six mentors. The program has a 95% retention rate.