Medicine and Public Health Internship - August 2010 in Rural Yunnan Province, China

  China

• Kunming: 
Kunming
• Rural Areas: 
Rural Areas

Term: Summer 
Duration of Program: 2-4 weeks
Dates: 8/10/2010 to 8/31/2010

Description: This August 2010 internship is a part of ChinaCal's work in the Zhaotong State in Yunnan Province, located in south China.

This internship is an opportunity to gain hands on experience with public health and medical care in the developing world. Interns will work with and assist the ChinaCal team as we travel into the Zhaotong State, a remote area of northeast Yunnan, performing research, screening for heart disease, treating cardiac ailments, and offering free general medical care to villagers who otherwise lack access to adequate health care. Interns will not only have the opportunity to travel to places where few Westerners have ever been, but they will get a chance to see from the ground level how a public health and primary care system operates in the developing world.

We will meet first with local administrative and medical leadership and use standard epidemiologic methodology to select a research sample of the adult population for study. We will then visit two or three villages where we will run daily research clinics to survey this random sample for blood pressure and ultrasound measurements of left ventricular size. Each afternoon and each market day will be devoted to adult and pediatric hypertension and cardiac clinics. We will also host open clinics at which we offer medical care to any and all comers, many of whom will travel for dozens of miles to visit our team.

Highlights: Zhaotong is located in the northeast corner of Yunnan province, near the border to Sichuan Province. Its terrain is lush and mountainous. Fossils discovered in the mountain caves indicate that human settlers began to move here one hundred thousand years ago, and many Neolithic relics have been discovered. Zhaotong has a plateau monsoon climate, which manifests itself as sunny and warmer in the summer months. Zhaotong also has great demographic diversity, among the 520 thousand minority people, Yi and Miao ethnic minorities dominate. Much of the trip will be spent working in these ethnic minority areas.

Qualifications: We require only that our interns have an interest in medicine in the developing world and that they are able to maintain a positive attitude in sometimes less-than-ideal living and working conditions. Candidates with backgrounds in clinical research and medicine will be given preference, but it is not a requirement.

Cost in US$: 1400 USD (tax deductible)

Experience Required: no

Typical Volunteer: Our previous interns and volunteers have been undergraduate, postgraduate, and medical students from around the world. Backgrounds vary from anthropological, international relations, public health, clinical medicine, and epidemiological.

Age Range: 18+

This Program is open to Worldwide Participants.

Application Process Involves:

• Other
• Phone Interview

Post-Program Services Include:

• Job and Internship Network

China California Heart Watch's Mission Statement: We, the China California Heart Watch, are a non-profit corporation working to further understanding and provide relief to the problems associated with hypertension and heart disease in rural western China. Based in Kunming, Yunnan's provincial seat, we work throughout the rural areas of Yunnan Province. We provide free training to village doctors in the diagnosis and treatment of hypertension and heart disease, we do research in some of the most remote villages in all of Yunnan, and we provide free, expert cardiac care at health clinics we host when on research trips. Hypertension is now one of the leading causes of death in China. Additionally, the prevalence of hypertension in rural areas is now reaching the same level as that in urban centers. China's rapidly developing economy and infrastructure is focused on the urban, industrial areas, often leaving behind a vacuum in rural areas in regards to the public health system. We attempt to mitigate the effects of this vacuum by providing free training and primary care to village doctors and citizens.

Year Founded: 2006