Volunteer opportunities at IUBAT College of Nursing

The IUBAT College of Nursing is a 4-year BSN program based in an English-medium not-for-profit university in Dhaka. The Bangladesh Health Project is staffed by Canadian volunteers, under the sponsorship of Vancouver’s Mid-Main Community Health Centre. We pay program costs entirely through donations and receive no government support.

At the College of Nursing, visiting faculty volunteers support IUBAT faculty to teach the nursing content, including clinical practice supervision and curriculum development. There are also co-teaching opportunities in the Master of Public Health program. Our visiting faculty are English-speaking professional educators or nurses with various qualifications and practical experience. Several volunteers have been post-graduate students simultaneously working on thesis projects. Some volunteers have backgrounds in other health care professions, such as medicine, psychiatric social work, clinical psychology, nutrition and so on. At this time, we can only host volunteers who are qualified in a health care-related field.

We cannot pay airfare, but can offer free room and board in the university guest house close to the verdant IUBAT campus. Six weeks is our preferred minimum stay so that volunteers can feel oriented and become most useful. We arrange airport pick-up and drop-off in Dhaka and all local travel, so that you are taken care of and can focus on the task during your time there. Previous visiting faculty have enjoyed their time at IUBAT, immersed in a vibrant culture, with warm collegial relationships and secure living arrangements. If you are looking for a meaningful volunteer experience, supporting a rapidly developing country, please contact us for further information BangladeshHealthProject@proton.me .

Bluebell school assessment 2024

Bluebell classroom November 2024

Bluebell School is operated by Oasis for Posterity in Balagram, a small town in Nilphamari district. It provides 60 children with a no-fees education from pre-school to grade five (the terminal primary grade in most of South Asia). The school serves an adjacent social housing village for landless families, with additional students attending from the nearby town.

Donor contributions helped us buy a classroom TV for on-line teaching programs

Several times, we have assessed children's learning in the two key cognitive skills, reading and arithmetic. How to do it? Unfortunately, in both India and Bangladesh, official learning outcomes reported for government schools are either impossible to interpret or seriously biased. Two decades ago, Pratham, a large Indian NGO initiated very large – over 600,000 children – biannual surveys conducted in students' homes. To enable comparison – between Bluebell and Balagram students, and between these schools and Indian equivalents – we used a protocol similar to the ASER surveys employed by Pratham in India.

Previously, we have organized in-home surveys only for children living in the social housing project. In 2024, for comparison, we also surveyed public school students in Balagram, the nearby town. Recently, BHP Director John Richards published a summary of the assessment findings (link below) John’s report covers not only the Bluebell assessment results but also the survey protocol, comparisons with results in India using the same survey tool, the impacts of Covid shut-downs and parental literacy, and “learning poverty”.

RICHARDS Bluebell School Assessment 2024.pdf

Download PDF • 752KB

Teaching MPH students at IUBAT

BHP Directors Alex Berland and John Richards are continuing to support development of the Master’s program in Public Health at IUBAT. Alex is teaching “Social and Behavioural Sciences in Public Health” and John is teaching “Biostatistics” via Zoom. There are also frequent email exchanges and online meetings with other program faculty, currently for instance, to plan internships and to review exam questions. On his recent visit to Bangladesh, Alex met with the newest batch of students as well as with the initial batch, who will soon proceed to their internships before graduating next spring.

https://www.onehealthcommission.org/en/resources__services/oh_resources_for_public_health_educators/

We initiated this MPH program for a specific purpose: The shortage of health-care providers [HCP] in Bangladesh is made worse by shortages of HCP with post-graduate training who can educate, supervise and lead others to deliver health services. This situation has created a favourable job market for capable individuals who have both clinical experience and specialized knowledge in areas such as adult education, NGO and hospital management, and research and evaluation. Several MPH programs exist already, but the quality is not always high and the focus is often narrow. The MPH that we have developed at IUBAT is rigorous, using modern educational methods, to prepare graduates who can tackle system-level problems in Bangladesh and internationally.

International students are welcome at IUBAT, a fully accredited English-medium university, with one of the loveliest campuses in Dhaka. We also invite public health professionals to join us as guest faculty or research collaborators by emailing BangladeshHealthProject@pm.me