Botswana Bound: students volunteer their services
Katie Ellias, WG'06
Issue date: 10/10/05 Section: Insider
Thousands of HIV patients, few doctors, limited financial resources. This is a common refrain in the developing world, and the situation that four healthcare management students walked into at the Independence Surgery Clinic in Gaborone, Botswana this August. Mike Palladinetti, Terry White, Denis Sirringhaus and I spent the last weeks of our summer this year consulting as a part of the student-run Wharton Healthcare International Volunteer Project (WHIVP).
WHIVP is designed to give healthcare management students the opportunity to participate in service projects for healthcare systems with limited resources and severe health problems, such as HIV. Each year, small groups of students volunteer for two to three week consulting engagements worldwide. Students have worked with Wharton Healthcare alumni in South Africa with the City of Cape Town Health System. This past winter, a team traveled to India to create an HIV epidemiologic profile and improve HIV screening and data collection for the Andhra Pradesh State AIDS Control Society.
Through the help of James Thompson, the Associate Director of the Sol C. Snider Entrepreneurial Research Center, the Botswana team spent our time on the ground in the capital of Botswana, working with Dr. Diana Dickenson, Independence Surgery's founder, and her staff. We set out to perform a top-to-bottom financial and operational assessment of the clinic with the aim of identifying key priorities for the owners. The clinic has been in operation for twenty years and sees thousands of patients annually, many of whom are HIV positive.
The HIV crisis in Botswana is acute, with between 35-40% of the adult population infected, roughly 350,000 people. The good news is that Botswana, which has one of the most productive economies in Africa thanks to its rich diamond resources, has been able to offer many of its infected citizens access to HIV testing and free anti-retro-viral therapies (ARVs), which are the standard of care for HIV in the developed world. The government of Botswana allows most infected citizens to receive free treatment at several public health facilities around the country. While this is a substantial initiative sponsored by the likes of Merck & Co. and the Gates Foundation, the HIV/AIDS pandemic requires a multi-pronged approach. The government ARV program requires patients first to get tested (something which many are unwilling to do) and then to receive treatment at a public hospital or clinic, usually in a section of the facility designated for HIV and infectious disease. Unfortunately, many infected individuals won't go to the clinic, for fear of being stigmatized as infected. This is where Dr. Dickenson and Independence Surgery come in.
WHIVP is designed to give healthcare management students the opportunity to participate in service projects for healthcare systems with limited resources and severe health problems, such as HIV. Each year, small groups of students volunteer for two to three week consulting engagements worldwide. Students have worked with Wharton Healthcare alumni in South Africa with the City of Cape Town Health System. This past winter, a team traveled to India to create an HIV epidemiologic profile and improve HIV screening and data collection for the Andhra Pradesh State AIDS Control Society.
Through the help of James Thompson, the Associate Director of the Sol C. Snider Entrepreneurial Research Center, the Botswana team spent our time on the ground in the capital of Botswana, working with Dr. Diana Dickenson, Independence Surgery's founder, and her staff. We set out to perform a top-to-bottom financial and operational assessment of the clinic with the aim of identifying key priorities for the owners. The clinic has been in operation for twenty years and sees thousands of patients annually, many of whom are HIV positive.
The HIV crisis in Botswana is acute, with between 35-40% of the adult population infected, roughly 350,000 people. The good news is that Botswana, which has one of the most productive economies in Africa thanks to its rich diamond resources, has been able to offer many of its infected citizens access to HIV testing and free anti-retro-viral therapies (ARVs), which are the standard of care for HIV in the developed world. The government of Botswana allows most infected citizens to receive free treatment at several public health facilities around the country. While this is a substantial initiative sponsored by the likes of Merck & Co. and the Gates Foundation, the HIV/AIDS pandemic requires a multi-pronged approach. The government ARV program requires patients first to get tested (something which many are unwilling to do) and then to receive treatment at a public hospital or clinic, usually in a section of the facility designated for HIV and infectious disease. Unfortunately, many infected individuals won't go to the clinic, for fear of being stigmatized as infected. This is where Dr. Dickenson and Independence Surgery come in.