Supporting a Human Rights Agenda: A Three-Pillar Virtue-Based Personal and Social Anthropology of Public Health Policy for Sub-Saharan Africa

Thesis advisor: James F. KeenanThesis advisor: Andrea ViciniSub-Saharan Africa has one of the worst health care systems in the world. Besides, underdeveloped economies paired with political instability do not offer much hope for improvement. In fact, despite many efforts by local, international organizations and governments to help in this field, the majority of the populations in this region do not have access to basic health care. With this in mind, the aim of this research project is to develop a personal and social anthropology of the human rights language read through the lens of the common good in order to contribute to creating and developing sustainable healthcare systems. While agreeing that many efforts have been made using different frameworks in the sphere of public health ethics in the past two decades and aware of the possibility that other underlying causes may have contributed to the failure of health systems in Sub-Saharan Africa, we will choose to address the human rights language as the main interlocutor for future contribution. This choice is motivated by the influence of human rights on public health policies that affect the lives of people in general.Thesis (STL) — Boston College, 2016.Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry.Discipline: Sacred Theology

The African dream of medical and nursing students : a pilot study from a medical volunteer team to Tanzania

Background: Following the footstep of Dr. Albert Schweitzer, most of the medical and nursing students in Taiwan would have The African Dream , i.e., the chance to have medical service in remote areas, especially some remote areas in African countries. Objective: This pilot study is to investigate the impact and effectiveness of a medical volunteer team from a medical college in Taiwan to a Maasai tribe in Engaruka, Tanzania, East Africa. Introduction of the Team: The medical volunteer team started from 2011 which comprised mainly of medical and nursing students from Fu-Jen Catholic University, through the linkage of the local catholic missionary in eastern Tanzania. The rationales of this volunteer team are to enhance integration of learning and identity formation through service-learning activities. The team focus on the following objectives: (1) health education to high school students in Engaruka village; (2) health education to local village people in order to improve maternal health, reduce child mortality and combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; (3) in collaboration to local governmental clinic to improve health and medical supplies. The complete cycle including preparing phase lasted for about 1 year. Although not yet being a formal curriculum, this volunteer team encourage lots of medical students to learn from service. Method: (1)All the students who participated before 2014 were follow-up using descriptive and qualitative measures to investigate for the impact and effectiveness of such medical volunteer team. (2)From 2014 team, a comprehensive quantitative questionnaire called Self-concept and service-learning form was used to evaluate the value of such service-learning activity. (3)All the students who participated in previous teams (from 2011 to 2014) would do a retrospective questionnaire also to measure the impact and effectiveness. This retrospective questionnaire will be designed by using Likert scale. Result: The complete results of these evaluation will be Paper presented in the up -coming conference