Careers in Global Health - identify your area of interest

So you're wanting to work in global health but you're not sure where to start. In this video we're going to talk about how you can identify your focus area of interest. Hi, my name is Greg Martin. This video forms part of a series of videos on careers in global health and we're going to be looking at the following. Firstly, how to identify your area of interest. Secondly, understanding the possible roles you might play and how it is that you're going to add value. Thirdly, we're going to take a look at the essential skills that you're going to need to be effective in the global health space. And finally, we're going to take a look at the kinds of organizations that you can apply to for jobs. So let's jump right in and take a look at how you can identify your area of interest. Now the reason that I'm starting with this is that global health is a composite discipline. It's not just one thing. And it's just about impossible to be an expert in everything. I like to divide these areas that you might want to be involved in into disease areas, exposures of interest, population groups, special issues and disciplines. At the end of this video, I'm going to talk about how you can mix and match across these categories to find your niche and that's going to help you understand how it is that you're going to add value, what skills you're going to need and what organizations you might want to look to for employment. Let's jump right in. Identifying your area of interest. Now this could be disease specific. And so let's just have a look at a couple of diseases. We're talking about HIV, TB, malaria, meningitis, influenza, polio eradication, neglected tropical diseases, novel zoonotic infections like Ebola, SARS, MERS-CoV, cancer, cardiovascular disease, strokes, COPD, diabetes, obesity, the surgical burden of disease, mental health issues, malnutrition, and many, many more. Your area of interest might be an exposure of interest. These are exposures that lead to disease, things like tobacco, alcohol, radiation, food issues, high caloric foods, salt, etc, etc. Your area of interest might be a population group. And here we're talking about things like maternal and child health, people living in poverty, displaced people, people living with disabilities, prisoners, people living in low-income countries, urban populations, rural populations, and many, many more. And of course it might be an issue. So here we're talking about emergency planning, environmental health, complex humanitarian emergencies, access to medicines, health service improvement, vaccines, gender equity and human rights, human resources for health, healthcare financing, ITC for health, supply chain for diagnostics and treatments, trade and health, climate change and health, bioterrorism, breastfeeding, e-health, the international health regulations, the TRIPS agreement, essential medicines, primary healthcare, reproductive health, water and sanitation, food security and the social determinants of health, and many, many more. And of course you might be interested in one of the broad disciplines that feed into public health. Things like epidemiology, health economics, health policy, technologies, health systems, education, health promotion, health protection, etc, etc. And of course many, many more. Now on the one hand, you could dig deep and hunker down on any one of these disease areas, or exposures, or population groups, or issues, or disciplines, and many people do. However in reality, you'll probably find that you land up developing an interest across these categories. So you might be interested in, for example, health policy, which is a discipline, and how it relates to the TRIPS agreement, which is a special issue, and how that affects access to HIV treatment, which is a disease area, and how that applies to mothers and children, which is a population group. So I hope you can see how these things fit together. I hope you found this useful. In the next video, we're going to take a look at the possible roles you might play in the global health space. I've got other videos on this YouTube channel that deal with careers in global health. There's going to be a link to the global health careers playlist in the description below. And of course I've got teaching videos on epidemiology, ethics, finding and using data, so please subscribe to this channel if you haven't already. Thank you for watching.