Summer EWH participants often find that they are challenged in unexpected ways; working with few resources at their disposal forces them to be creative and truly think outside the box to solve real-word problems. This past summer, a group of students repurposed disused IV poles to create hand sanitizer stations at their placement hospital. Another example are blood pressure cuffs, a frequently used item that is typically discarded at the end of its lifespan. In the USA, a blood pressure cuff is not an item that a technician will repair — it will simply be replaced because it is relatively inexpensive. In rural parts of Uganda, however, these cuffs can be difficult to locate. EWH volunteers have found that if they are unable to source a replacement, a punctured cuff can be patched using a bicycle tube patch kit. Although this is not seen as a long-term solution, it can keep a patient monitor in use until a replacement cuff is able to be sourced from a larger city. In a small clinic that might only have one patient monitor, this can make all the difference. These problem-solving skills will ultimately make them better engineers in their future careers in research and development or manufacturing.
In reality, most engineering students do not end up working in global health directly, and do not see global health as a viable career path, but instead, often turn towards higher-paying opportunities in corporate, tech and industrial sectors. However, engineers, no matter the role, have a part to play in improving health-care delivery around the world. Engineers can make a real impact on global health by considering challenges posed in low-resource settings in their designs and by striving for greater accessibility. How many power surges can your design handle before failing? Will it hold up outside of a sterile, temperature-controlled operating room? Does it have too many parts that need frequent replacing making it unusable if these parts cannot be imported? We must begin to design with the whole world in mind, developing solutions that work in challenging environments.
However, to create long-term impact on low-resource health-care systems, we also need to strengthen local capacity to keep critical medical equipment in service.
