Thursday, October 8, 2015

Oct. 8. 2015. CORE Group Global Health Practitioner Conference [Day 1]

Without a full motivation, public health is not possible to emit the shiny light. To tell the truth, I was almost suffocated by the normal life these days, so I have always tried to find something fresh moment that suddenly motivates me again. I had never imagined that CORE Group Global Health Practitioner Conference would have a rich source of inspiration for me. All of us might have heard of this, how to get a job, how to start a new career, and how to successfully undertake the task at least one time: the answer was always networking, networking, and networking… So then, how do we start the vague, intangible, and difficult networking? It is not hard! You might also have heard the answer for that: Close the laptop right now, and go out to see the people.

It was true! Just as most people, I was in the middle of bunch of things to do, but I just drove to the conference place, Washington DC. Actually, I have been waiting for this conference for a long time. I was a bit sad that my oral presentation application was not accepted for “New Information Circuit,” but I still wanted to attend this conference. I thought my research work, quantitative analysis by using Lives Saved Tool, was pretty new for the New Information Circuit session, but I realized that this CORE Group Conference, which is held twice per year, have already dealt with this analysis several times. Wow… I have to keep up with all new information from now. Global health practitioners should be sensitive to embrace up-to-date framework and concepts with keen eyes!

CORE Group Conference, established in 1997, is for exchanging new ideas and knowledge among more than 75 organizations in 180 countries. CORE Group members and associates are mostly NGOs, academics, and for-profit organizations, and they gather at the conference to make unified and centralized synergy to have a positive influence on community health. I think it is a great movement to cooperate with each other for creating “Trending topics in community health.” I joined the conference as a World Vision Global Health Fellow, the position that I am officially done quite a long time ago. Nonetheless, I was happy to become one of CORE Group members to meet Alfonso and Lianna from World Vision. We were in Sierra Leone together when there was an Ebola outbreak over there last year. There were some students and early career professionals among attendees, so I also enjoyed interacting with them during social networking time. The session about supervising community health workers and monitoring & evaluation gave me a better sense of finding thesis topic as a prospective doctoral student. It is interesting moment that everyone in the conference mentioned one person’s name “Henry Perry,” whenever they talked about community health worker and health systems. He is my lovely teacher at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health! I am glad to know he has made a great contribution to develop the guidance for managing community-based primary health care.

I am already excited to attend Conference Day 2 tomorrow. The conference reminded me again public health would be strengthened unlimitedly if people put their heads together to better other’s lives.

No comments:

Post a Comment