Hello again!

After spending an entire month working at the World Health Organization, today I will briefly write about an interesting operational aspect of the WHO – the astonishingly high turnover rate of staff.

Within my own department over the past month, I have seen seven WHO staff/interns come or go, while only four remain constant (including myself). During my stay I will cycle through four intermediate supervisors, and as an intern with a month under my belt, I have effectively reached WHO intern “senior status.” This is then further compounded with the high number of external consultant, country offices, and collaborative partnerships who come and go. Unfortunately this is a phenomena not isolated to my experience or my department. Logistically, it’s a wonder that projects, reports, and collaboration can still happen with this lack of continuity, yet it happens every day. From my experience, communication and coordination is a very large part of working at the WHO. It’s a challenge to work within this environment but also exciting at the same time as it provides the opportunity to work with a large number and diverse group of people! As an example, coordinating my project, entitled Phase II of “local production and technology transfer to increase access to medical devices in low resource settings,” involves at some point people at WHO-HQ (Geneva), WHO country offices, former WHO staff, and not to mention the large majority of external collaborations and relationships scattered across the globe, in different time zones, and with varying degrees of access to internet. Ultimately, it was initially a shock to see how quickly people come and go, but at this point it’s become the norm and we learn to work with it.

In other news, as I am a mere two months away from starting medical school, I hope to spend the next few weeks meeting people to help me think about my future career in medicine, research, and policy. There is a section in Neglected Tropical Diseases that seems especially interesting. I recently made a list of all the WHO topics that seemed interesting to me, and the list was far too long, so I’ve set out to start narrowing down my interests. Granted, I understand this may be an exercise in futility but I shall try nonetheless.

Thanks again to BTB for this great opportunity, and I’ll report back in the next week on another topic that I think everyone battles with at the WHO – conflict of interest and some insight on how it effects my own unit of Medical Devices.

Thanks for reading!