While debate over the shape of national health care reform continues to endure, Liana Woskie’s ’10 path for improving public health and policy has just been secured.

Woskie, a College of Social Studies Major (CSS), was recently awarded a Watson Fellowship, a prestigious one-year grant for independent study offered to graduating college seniors. Woskie’s project, “Bringing Primary Healthcare Home: The Community Health Worker,” will research what resources and structures are necessary for a successful community health worker system through case studies of programs already in place in Bangladesh, India, Thailand, Tanzania, and Lesotho.

“In the short run, it will be difficult coming face to face with very intense health needs and approaching them from a social studies background,” Woskie said. “But this is work that has long-term implications.”

The Watson Fellowship is awarded to 40 students from over 800 applicants nationwide. According to the program’s website, the fellowship offers promising college graduates a year of independent, purposeful study and travel outside the United States in order to enhance their capacity for effective resourcefulness, leadership, and participation in the world community. Students must first apply to be nominated by their institution before applying to the fellowship. The fellowship offers a stipend of $25,000 to cover costs of the projects.
The term “community health worker” is a broad categorization of people in a community that are not medically trained professions, but act as intermediaries between patients and the more structured medical service. According to Woskie, community health care workers, through their knowledge of the language, culture, and circumstances of the community, can be a vital and effective part of a region’s health provisions system and help increase the accessibility of care.

“It’s really interesting how old structures of care-giving interface with biomedical resources that are becoming increasingly available in developing areas of the world,” Woskie said. “Community health workers are able to interface better than physicians by bridging the anthropological gap with biomedical resources.”

Woskie is particularly interested in how similar models deviate from one region to another. For instance, the program in Tanzania she plans to study is modeled after a system she will study in Bangladesh—this is the only case of a developing country instituting a community health worker system from another developing state.

“There are a lot of interesting dynamics in play that you have to be extremely aware of,” Woskie said. “It’s fascinating how the lessons carry over from low resource regions of a developing country to low resource areas of a place like the US.”

Woskie initially became interested in community health issues during her sophomore year through a service learning class, The Health of Communities, taught then by Health Professions advisor Peggy Cary Best. As part of the class, Woskie worked at the Middlesex community health center and conducted research on the availability of healthcare for low-income individuals in the area.

“That really spurred my interest in community health workers in an effort to alleviate some of the resource gaps that I found,” Woskie said. “There are similar issues in all low resource areas.”

Woskie has additionally gained insight into resource availability through her work with Partners in Health, a Boston based organization that works to bring modern medical care to poor communities around the world, and through research for her thesis on incorporating community health workers into Medicaid.

More recently, Woskie has become involved with the Kibera School for Girls, begun by Kenny Odede ’12 and other students, which plans to open a clinic this summer in Kibera, Kenya in memory of Johanna Justin-Jinich ’10. Woskie is particularly excited about the prospects of implementing a community health workers system given the Kibera School’s financial limitations for the project.

“What we are trying to do is make [the clinic] as sustainable and cost effective as possible,” Woskie said. “Community health workers are not about making the community reliant on external resources but having community members teach others. This can be sustained at a low cost.”

Though Woskie anticipates that it will be difficult to implement her research project on her own with few external resources, the Watson Fellowship provides awardees the flexibility to change components of their plans once initially accepted.

According to Woskie, the Watson Fellowship fosters more creative, nuanced ideas unlike other fellowships that focus more strictly on academic work. The projects accepted for the coming year range dramatically, from exploring the various connotations of the Islamic veil in France, Morocco, Turkey, India, and United Arab Emirates, to a cross-cultural exploration of games and childhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, Kenya, and India.

Though Woskie wrote the proposal for her application this past summer, she still remains as passionate about her project’s goal.

“If I had to rewrite it now, this project would still be exactly what I want to do,” Woskie said.