Cross-cultural caring: EMU’s Betty Beard, Martha Tanicala and Christeen Holdwick are working with dedicated professionals halfway across the globe to bring health care to Bangladesh, where the per capita annual income is less than $500 and half the population is illiterate.
C
hristeen Holdwick remembers her first view of a Bangladeshi public hospital. Rickshaws, bicycles and cars converged on the entrance from all angles. The vast, open waiting room was lined with hun-
dreds of sick people, many of them so poor they had walked for miles just to get there. Many were children. The air was hot and sticky. The ill and injured waited patiently on hard seats that looked like church pews, biding their time until they could get the care they so desperately needed. Others were on the floor, covering nearly every inch of the space. “It was a sea of people who didn’t feel good, and they
waited and waited,” she says. Such a scene is common in Bangladesh, a densely popu-
lated country in South Asia that is bordered by India, Burma and the Bay of Bengal. More than 150 million people—half the population of the United States—are crammed into a geographic region about the size of Iowa. Monsoon sea- son lasts from June to October, and flooding often leads to
Pictured on previous page, from left to right: EMU’s Christeen Holdwick, Martha Tanicala, Betty Beard
widespread infectious diseases like malaria, dengue fever and typhoid fever. Clean water is in short supply, and many people are malnourished. Hospitals with 500 beds often have double that number of patients, and two people are frequent- ly assigned to a single bed. If ever a place needed more access to health care, that
place is Bangladesh. Consider another statistic: There are only 11 nurses for
every 100,000 patients. This is where Holdwick comes in. An advisor in EMU’s
School of Nursing, she is also an executive team member of the Global Health Services Network, a management and consulting firm that works with hospitals around the world. In Bangladesh, a renowned ophthalmologist named Rabiul Husain, founder of the Chittagong Eye Infirmary and Training Complex, is working to start a large general hospital that will include a school of nursing. Global Health Services arranged to send a team of experts to conduct a site visit and assessment, so Holdwick engaged two of her Eastern Michigan colleagues—Betty Beard, director of EMU’s School of Nursing, and Martha Tanicala, an associate professor of nursing—and the three registered nurses were soon getting
22 Eastern | WINTER 2011
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