The determined expressions and the smiles tell the story - the children clearly had an enjoyable afternoon. Recently the school received a donation of sports items such as balls, cricket sets, badminton and chess sets, and skipping ropes.
And there were prizes!
Prof. Hasnat Alamgir, Chair of Public Health at IUBAT publishes frequently on health care topics in the Financial Express of Bangladesh. In his latest editorial, he writes, “In most hospitals in Bangladesh, the Emergency Departments … appear to be very busy, crowded, and often quite chaotic. The healthcare professionals look overwhelmed and exhausted while attending to the very large number of care seekers. This begs these questions to be answered: 1) do all the patients in Bangladesh who go to ED always really need emergency care? 2) Given other options for receiving care, would they still go to ED? 3) Is the emergency care capacity for the population so low that more EDs should be built?” His conclusion is that a stronger primary care delivery system and a focus on social determinants of health would reduce the need and use of acute healthcare services. These will be major themes of the MPH program to be offered at IUBAT.
Rabiul Islam reports on the results from the national standardized exams written by students in all Civil and Computer Science diploma programs. A central authority grades the exams; its report shows that our first semester OIST students did better than students from many other institutions, even well-established colleges. From OIST, 24 students appeared in the examinations. 19 passed, all with GPA above 3.0 out of 4.0. 5 students failed in one subject (physics theory), probably because they did not study physics in high school. We are planning to upgrade technology in teh OIST Computer Lab because in their second semester, the Computer Science students will study Computerized Graphics Design-I (PS, AI) and Python Programming and Civil Engineering will have AutoCad.
