Health Education Enhancement Initiative
The Health Education Enhancement Initiative is a conglomeration of projects aimed at improving health through education and research in Ghana. The primary approach is to impact the educational experience of health-care workers in training while simultaneously creating a more amicable atmosphere for research that is conducive for information and knowledge sharing.
The initial project was a book drive campaign across university campuses within the United States that collected textbooks in medicine, nursing, psychology and public health, and shipped them to Ghana. However, we soon realized that although periodically harnessing books that would otherwise be discarded and sending them to places where they would be used was a noble idea and reduces the quantity of global waste generated, donated books quickly become obsolete in a matter of years because newer editions are produced at an even more rapid rate. These challenges prompted us to reconsider our goal for HEEI and to re-strategize. While we are still targeting the original book drive project for completion, the HEEI now focuses more on sustainable approaches to achieving its aims.
Medical Library, Korle-bu Teaching Hospital (Image courtesy of UC Berkeley)
Given the rapidly changing digital landscape and subsequent openness afforded by the internet, our current main project involves building a webportal that catalogs open access journals where students, researchers and faculty can easily find and retrieve vital research information. This portal will be a space where high quality publications by research faculty in Ghana can be made accessible to the world, and where students in Ghana can connect with world-class research mentors and with their peers in universities in the diaspora. We are trying to build a library that utilizes information technology networking to make access to resources and information more open to students at particular schools in Ghana who would otherwise have troubling locating as many open access journals as possible. The HEEI thus plans to make the latest health information available via e-books and e-journals to students in Ghana. This way, students in Ghana enjoy the privilege of access to high quality teaching and mentoring by leaders in health research half way across the world.
PROJECT DIRECTOR
Charles Kwesi Amoatey Odonkor is a fourth year MD candidate at Yale University, who has strong interest in global health, academic medicine and education. Born and bred in Ghana, he holds a BS in Biochemistry and Psychology, and a Masters in Cell, Molecular and Developmental Biology from Sewanee and Washington University in St. Louis, respectively. One of his visions is to help develop an Afro-centric healthy care and policy institute with a focus on novel community based approaches to addressing disease and health issues that are locally relevant and pertinent to the African continent.
He sees medical training and education as key to producing the next generations of leaders who would transform health practices and service delivery in Ghana, as well as Africa. He views his involvement in REACH as an opportunity to help connect medical students and health care professionals in Ghana to educational, clinical resources and medical networks abroad. Through REACH, he hopes to promote health education initiatives that would enable trainees have access to the tools and knowledge they need to help provide quality care on the continent.
For more information about the HEEI project, please send an email to heei@reachghana.org
