I hope to earn a Master of Public Health with a concentration in health care management, public policy development, and education; and I plan to also develop a concurrent focus on crisis and disaster management. I look forward to a lifetime of creative research in the search for ways to better implement intervention policies that are able to provide the population with direct access to primary health care--even in the face of emergencies—due to public health preparedness education and strategic planning, even in a developing world country such as my own, Pakistan, that is prone to natural disasters as well as plagued by political violence
Three months ago, I had the chance of meeting Dr XXXX, a practicing pulmonologist in Farmington, Connecticut, United States. We got into a discussion concerning the primary health care structure in Pakistan, what it is lacking, and why the system is failing. The basic health unit (BHU), the first medical contact available to villagers, is found without a doctor and all too often with a lock on the door and no help to be found at all. For the BHUs to be functional we need to provide incentives for doctors to work in rural areas and ensure an authority is responsible to ensure that quality of service is maintained and checked regularly. I was especially excited by an example that Dr. XXXX told me about a module in the US where a team of attending physicians rotates into a rural area for one week out of each month, enhancing the coverage and quality of care in those rural areas that are most in need of that care. Completing my MPH program will provide me with the opportunity to explore a wide range of health care delivery models and creative ideas for bringing health care to rural areas, especially in the Developing World.
I look forward to working on medical education and awareness especially in much neglected parts of the interior, in Sindh, Baluchistan and Punjab. My project of diarrhea awareness and basic preventive measure in ‘Mithi’ Thar Parkar helped me to become acutely aware of the deadly consequences of our vast health care delivery disparities between our rural and urban populations. I would continue to do parallel projects with ‘Akhurath’ and ‘Rotary Foundation’ and align my health awareness programs with welfare projects that are already in place.
One of the highlights of my career so far was going to India as part of an intellectual exchange conference where I had the opportunity to meet fellow members of the Rotary Foundation, who had successfully improved their health care systems using primary health care campaigns in rural areas. We face special challenges in my country because Pakistan has been facing one natural disaster after the other or as long as I can remember. Every year, we face floods and every year we realize how utterly unprepared we are. Command structures break down and information delivery systems fail to function; all in the absence of adequate plans of action for what few emergency response resources do exist.
Once I earn the MPH Degree in America, I hope to work with our National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) to address the most salient structural weaknesses that result in our inability to respond to natural disasters with medical assistance to the victims.
Sample Statement of Research Objective for the MPH Degree.