| Wednesday, April 25
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College student to study abroad |
"I'd like to get my feet wet in the real-world public health and international medicine field," the 22-year-old from Castleton said Monday.
Thornblade graduates in May with a degree in biology from Hamilton College and departs for Vietnam in August as a Fulbright scholar. The Fulbright program funds, among other activities, advanced research abroad. Thornblade will spend 10 months studying the establishment of family medicine practice in rural Vietnam.
"Right now, there is a big need," he said. "Vietnam, economically, is developing quite well. Their medical infrastructure is developing top-heavy. They have a lot of great medical schools with a lot of students who are going to make good doctors. They don't have a lot of training in primary care, general medicine."
Thornblade also said the graduates of Vietnam's medical schools primarily go to work in its city hospitals, a problem in a country where 80 percent of the population lives in rural areas. Though a network of clinics serve every village in the country, Thornblade said, it is seriously understaffed.
"Only one in two of those clinics has a physician," he said.
In the course of his research, Thornblade will work with the faculty at the medical school in Hue, Vietnam, as well as the staff at communal health center in Khanh Hoa province.
Thornblade said he began thinking about the project after a semester in Vietnam through the Brattleboro-based School for International Training. He said the selection of Vietnam to spend a semester in was almost accidental — it was one of the programs he found that did not have a language requirement.
"I also wanted to study development and ecology and culture," he said. "Those were a part of that program."
Thornblade said he saw what was happening in Vietnam's medical infrastructure then and was inspired to study it more with the goal of figuring out how to get more of the country's doctors into its countryside.
The study will include surveys of and interviews with Vietnamese physicians who have gone through retraining in family medicine, which Thornblade said he believes provides the most efficient model for health care in the rural areas of Vietnam because of its long-term focus.
"You work with patients throughout their lifetime," he said. "You work with their entire family, so you can understand hereditary condition better."Labels: study abroad |
posted by ^%&^
@ 10:31 PM
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