Attending the conference at Mount Sinai are, from left: Raymond Aborigo, PhD, Helen McGuire, MHSc, David Heller, MD, MPH, and Engelbert Nonterah, MD, PhD.
Since 2017, I’ve been privileged to collaborate with Ghana’s Navrongo Health Research Centre (NHRC) to explore and develop new care models to treat chronic diseases like high blood pressure and depression.
We work in rural communities where there is often no doctor. Our hope is to create and refine programs that improve primary care access worldwide, including in the rural United States, by training nurses and health workers to diagnose and manage these conditions through door-to-door home visits.
I’ve benefited enormously from the research expertise of my colleagues at NHRC, who for more than 30 years have worked tirelessly on countless such studies to close the health gap between urban and rural Ghana—on subjects ranging from malaria to safe childbirth to COVID-19.
Rachel Vreeman, MD, MS, addressing the conference.
Recently, our Mount Sinai partnership in Ghana underwent a major change. With support from the Arnhold Institute for Global Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, my partnership co-director Raymond Aborigo, PhD, a senior social scientist at NHRC, and I convened a week-long conference at Mount Sinai. This conference was aimed at expanding this collaboration from a discrete research project centered on our own adult chronic disease efforts to a bilateral institutional partnership welcoming all the best research minds at Mount Sinai to collaborate with NHRC across all aspects of rural primary care. And since both Mount Sinai and NHRC see research as but one of the three core aims of health leadership, we also mapped out avenues for collaborations for the other two: teaching the next generation of health providers and scholars, and directly providing health care itself informed by novel research and rendered by excellent trainees.
From June 5 through June 9, the Arnhold Institute hosted not only Dr. Aborigo but also Engelbert Nonterah, MD, PhD, a physician and heart disease researcher, and NHRC’s institutional director, Patrick Ansah, MS, MPH. Through meetings with department heads and deans for fields ranging from obstetrics to environmental health to medical education, we mapped out more opportunities to expand the Ghana partnership than we could have imagined—for the benefit of Mount Sinai as much as NHRC. We’re now discussing strategies to send young Mount Sinai scholars to Navrongo, Ghana, to study the impact of pollution on cardiovascular health, researching the genetic causes of heart disease and expanding access to obstetric care.
NHRC offers unique resources and opportunities. NHRC is the premier research agency of the government of Ghana, and when its programs succeed they can be implemented as national health policy. Their research in the 1990s on sending nurses and health volunteers to remote regions to provide door-to-door care cut deaths in half in children under five, and this “Navrongo Experiment” subsequently became the standard of care across Ghana. Further, NHRC completes a census at least twice a year of more than 150,000 people in the local community, allowing precise, up-to-date health data to both guide and measure health interventions by tracking the burden of disease.
But perhaps most importantly, NHRC is universally respected by their community for engaging in ethical, compassionate health research targeted directly at areas of greatest local need. For this reason, Dr. Ansah told us, not only does NHRC rarely struggle to recruit participants for new vaccine trials or other studies, but persons deemed ineligible for these programs sometimes appeal to the Centre to let them into the study anyway.
NHRC also shares Mount Sinai’s core values and that of the Arnhold Institute: conducting cutting-edge research to close health disparities and protect the vulnerable, and ensuring that this work leads to, and learns from, excellence in medical teaching and improving patient care. Moreover, a new university, the C. K. Tedam University of Technology and Applied Sciences, founded in 2020 a mile from NHRC, already boasts a public health school, with a medical school to follow in a few years.
Mount Sinai’s partnership in Ghana has never been stronger, and the possibilities revealed to Dr. Aborigo and me this past month alone have exceeded the greatest expectations we had. With the research and teaching talent of Mount Sinai and NHRC—coupled with our complementary resources and shared values—we have the capacity to build together an alliance to change how primary care is delivered in Ghana and beyond.
David Heller, MD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor at the Arnhold Institute for Global Health and the Department for Global Health and Health System Design and co-director of the Arnhold Institute’s global partnership in Ghana.