1. Introduction
As a medical student, I had a chance to learn about clinical medicine. But I had a general lack of knowledge and experience in public and environmental health issues.
My previous work experience in underdeveloped countries (South Africa, Egypt, Sudan and South Sudan) made me question the ability of medicine, and whether clinical medicine alone could solve the problems in such countries. This question yet remains unanswered in my mind.
The World Health Organization is a symbol of public health, and I had hopes that working here would enlighten me and help to answer these questions. In particular, I was interested in the European Centre for Environment and Health office in Bonn, which is well known as an independent and specialized office with its focus in Environment and Health.
I applied for internship in WHO/ECEH office in Bonn, and have been working here for almost five months. I gained a wealth of experience which I could not have gained from medical school education alone. I gained insight into the work of WHO, in particular, in preparing official publications and guidelines from the early stages of the work.
The work experience at this office has been extremely valuable, not only in terms of gaining a better understanding of public health, but also in terms of guiding my plans for my future post-graduate studies in public health.
2. Timeline
My original internship schedule was from 01.03.2011 to 31.05.2011 By the request of Rokho Kim and Matthias Braubach for their occupational health work and housing guide line work, my internship period was extended until 19.07.2011. From March to May this year I worked with both Rokho Kim and Matthias Braubach - with approximately two thirds of my workload with Rokho Kim on Occupational health and Noise, and the other third with Matthias Braubach on Housing and Health Guidelines (HHGL) development. In June, I focussed on Occupational health with finalizing and layout of “National Profile Series; Occupational Health System in Finland” and “Germany”. From July to the end of my internship, I worked with Matthias Braubach and Nathalie Roebbel (from WHO Genève), Task 3 for HHGL development.
3. Assigned Duties
· To provide support for the preparation of meetings (e.g., PHAN meeting in April, and TFH meeting in May), and to learn about the form and contents of WHO activities.
· To assist the supervisors in the preparation of project proposals and technical documents by performing literature search and data collection upon request.
· To assist the supervisors in the maintenance of the database of the European Network on Workers’ Health, WHO CCs and national focal points.
· To assist in the general tasks of WHO/ECEH (Bonn) upon request and/or approval of supervisor
· To prepare a report on the activities during the internship period, and present it at a staff meeting during the last week of the internship
4.1 Work done with Rokho Kim
As an Occupational health intern, I needed to read and understand the publication “Worker’s health: global plan of action”. From this document, I learned the ability to work better with occupational health-related documents.. Most of my work involved documentation work, such as proof-reading, reference editing, figure and table sorting in same format. I attended a meeting about Asbestos in July and prepared a presentation based on statistics from questionnaires on 24 countries. Those are the list of documents that I worked on with him.
· Burden of disease from environmental noise: Quantification of healthy life years lost in Europe
· WHO Global Plan of Action on Workers’ Health: implementation in the European Region 2010-2013
· Launching the “European network for workers’ Health” Joint meeting of WHO Collaborating Centres and National Focal Points
· Needs assessment of capacity building on health risk assessment of environmental noise: Case studies
· Methodological guidance for estimating burden of disease from environmental noise
· National Profile Series 1: Occupational health system in Finland
· National Profile Series 2: Occupational health system in Germany
For some of these articles, I simply edited them in WHO format. For others, I edited the tables, figures, headings, fonts for body text, and reference formats. I helped to prepare “Burden of disease from environmental noise” for WHO official ISBN printing, so I spent considerable time on this particular item. The last two documents “National Profile Series” were in their unedited, raw format so I arranged the text, figures, tables, and reference sources in WHO format.. I also edited and did final layout work on the last two documents to make them suitable for printing.
4.2 Work done with Matthias Braubach (also with Nathalie Roebbel in WHO Genève)
As an intern in housing health, I focused on HHGL development. This project was a joint work between Bonn and Genève. Although the work involved two locations, there was just an initial framework to work with, so I had to work on this project right from the beginning. Initially, I need to set up a method for searching publications which were already reviewed by professional groups. To do this, I spent time developing an ideal search and method for systematic reviewing, data collection, WHO guide development, and for the efficient use of online database.. From March to May I used 9 key-words set on PubMed and 5 key-works on Cochrane called Task 1. I had 1 832 results from PubMed and 439 results from Cochrane. They were 2 271 results from all databases. All searched data were saved in EndNote format and exported word documents for abstracts and titles and excel sheets for sorting out for evaluation. Those evaluations were done by Arnaud Ferrand.
During Task 1 in HHGL, I had tele-conferences with Nathalie Roebbel to understand my work in HHGL in more detail and gave her help for technical materials with Endnote and Excel data.
I also joined the meeting on physical activity in socially disadvantage group, and I made working group report papers from their original reports, and I was able to join their small group meeting and social dinner with highly professions on the project.
For my last internship period, in July I worked on Task 3, using specific 29 terms only with systematic reviews and meta-analysis papers on PubMed. All searched data will be saved in EndNote format also will be exported in Word and Excel format for further evaluation.
5. Conclusion
As an intern for 5 months in WHO, I had a chance to work on not only technical support for WHO but also behind-the-scene and unreported work.
In particular, during the work on burden of disease from environmental noise and National Profile series, I was deeply amazed by high expectation of work quality in WHO and their process for copyright, editing, layout and printing. I dare to say that they do their work in highly professionalism to produce best quality products for public health and the other health issues in the world.
On the others hand, working on HHGL was another experience for me to learn about the development of WHO guidelines from the initial stages. I now have a good understanding of the work involved in producing such guidelines and the amount of work involved in publishing these for world-wide databases.
The behind-the-scene and unreported work I did for WHO mainly involved preparation for meetings. From this work, I gained insight into the amount of preparation and work involved prior to meetings, and about the human resources needed for such meetings. From this work, I had a chance to understand WHO and their working background effort to make good meetings.
I really appreciate Rokho Kim and Matthias Braubach for their work as a supervisor for me. I would like to express my gratitude for all staff members in the office. Being in WHO as an intern was one of the most valuable experience I have had. My experiences here has made valuable contribution to my decisions to pursue a career in public health and gave me a broader view on improving the health of the general population, in particular, those who do not have a good access to medicine.
Intern
Hojoon Daniel Lee
