Enhancing an International Perspective in Public Health Teaching through Formalized University Partnerships.

Teaching in the field of public health needs to employ a global perspective to account for the fact that public health problems and solutions have global determinants and implications as well. International university partnerships can promote such a perspective through the strengthening of cooperation, exchange, and communication between academic institutions across national boundaries. As an example for such an academic network in the field of public health, we introduce the International Public Health Partnership-a collaboration between a university in Germany and universities in India, Turkey, and Nigeria. Formed in 2005, it facilitated the exchange of information, fostered discussion about the transferability of public health concepts, contributed to the structural development of the universities involved, and promoted an intercultural dialog through a combination of local and distance learning activities. Although well accepted by students and staff, different obstacles were encountered; these included limited external funding, scarce own financial, time and personnel resources, and diverging regulations and structures of degree programs at the partnership sites. In the present article, we share several lessons that we learned during our joint collaboration and provide recommendations for other universities that are involved in partnerships with institutions of higher education or are interested to initiate such collaborations.

Stories of chickens and dogs: a narrative metaphor for the analysis of encounters in the veterinary clinic.

This article analyses veterinary interviews obtained from the city of Maiduguri, Northeast Nigeria, from a perspective that blends Mishler's construct of voices with the narrative critique that has evolved from studies of medical care. Although consulting vets studied occasionally show proof of narrative rationality, including the facilitation of and attentiveness to, the 'voice of the lifeworld" consideration of the broader biographical and environmental context of the clinical presentation, and so on, we also observe a number of negative clinical and public health outcomes of the consultations. The latter underscore the need for narrative ethics to be institutionalized in veterinary training and care. Indeed, the fact of veterinary practice involving an inarticulate patient and a caretaker who alone is able to construct the illness experience of the animal provides a strong rationale for the cultivation of narrative rationality by professionals in this area of care.

Multilingualism and healthcare in Nigeria: a management perspective.

Nigeria has a healthcare system that has been described as defective even by its managers. A year 2000 study by the World Health Organization (WHO) of health systems in 191 member countries ranked Nigeria 187th. These several evaluations consistently point to inadequate managerial skills. Regrettably, very little is known of the import of language and communication as management issues in healthcare delivery in this country of 400 languages. This article therefore proposes a language-driven audit of health management in Borno State (northeast Nigeria) as a means of sensitizing policy makers and implementers. Based largely on data from questionnaires completed by 129 health professionals belonging to various professional categories (physicians, nurses, pharmacy staff, laboratory staff, and medical and health workers) and drawn from four hospitals, the study explores the relationship between multilingualism and the following: (a) patients' rights; (b) staff recruitment, deployment and commitment; (c) human asset accounting; (d) physician-population ratio. This language-driven audit reveals a number of points, including: ethically questionable practices; distributional imbalance in personnel; commendable cases of employee commitment; and inequity in renumeration.