Bass Connections: Maria Pita, Cultural Anthropology '21

Maria Pita

After the declaration of a public health emergency following the outbreak of coronavirus, it became clear to me that this was a vitally important time to learn about infectious disease control, medical management and the role of care-providers in delivering proper healthcare to the people who are most likely to need it and least likely to have it.

The mission of my project, Sustainably Improving Neurosurgical Patient Outcomes in Uganda, is to focus on all these aspects of healthcare. The goal of the research is three-fold: improving surgical training, strengthening hospital partnerships and providing Ugandan medical students with sustainable job placements. To that end, I collected data on East African health systems, specifically in Tanzania, to aid in the team’s efforts of creating long-term growth models aimed at reaching the target threshold of 50 Ugandan-trained neurosurgeons spread across the country.  Read more.