Eight MDP students not only participated but excelled at the Emory Global Health Institute’s annual intramural Global Health Case Competition on February 11th. Throughout the competition, multidisciplinary student teams compete in developing and presenting proposals that seek to address a real-life case scenario illustrating a complex global health challenge. The competition consists of two phases: an intramural competition composed of Emory University teams and an international competition in which the winning Emory team competes alongside teams from across the US and around the world. Every year, a prompt is created by EGHI, consisting of a topic in global health and two countries that students must choose between for the focus of their project. This year, teams chose either Indonesia or Papua New Guinea and were required to create innovative palliative care programs for one of these contexts. After receiving the case description, students had only a few days in which to devise interdisciplinary solutions and create dynamic presentations to explain the programs they had devised.

MDP was strongly represented by eight students in five teams in the intramural competition. Two MDP’ers were members of the teams that placed 1st and 2nd. Maria Guzman was on the winning team, along with five other students from the schools of Public Health, Medicine, and Business. Their plan for training medical staff in Papua New Guinea included access and regulation of opioids for the palliative care of terminal patients, as well as community training through the church regarding how best to handle the medical situations of individuals suffering from the final stages of painful terminal illnesses such as HIV and cancer. Maria’s team won $3,000 and will now go on to compete in the international phase of the competition, which will be held in late March.

In the final round of the competition, Maria’s team went head-to-head with another MDP student, Ryan Mintz, who finished the competition in an impressive second place. Ryan, along with five other students from the schools of Nursing, Public Health, and Law, created a plan focused on building upon already existing institutions in Indonesia to improve on palliative care through the pillars of community, family, and health systems, including use of traditional puppet theater for education.  

In addition to Maria and Ryan, Ruofei Chen, Andreina Cordova, Xin Li, Sarah Durry, Sidra Khalid, and Mia Nieves participated in the competition this year. Check back soon to see how Maria and her team fare in the international competition!

Top Photo: Maria Guzman, second-year MDP student, was on the winning team!
Middle Photo: Andreina Cordova, Maria Guzman, and Ruofei Chen before the competition
Bottom Photo: Team 4 included four MDP'ers : Xin Li, Sidra Khalid, Mia Nieves, and Sarah Durry