Summer Archives

Hytham Al-Hindi Amman, Jordan - United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)

UNRWA Health Internship

This summer I had the opportunity to intern under the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), an agency whose mandate is to provide relief to Palestinian refugees. The purpose of my project was to conduct research on diabetic patient satisfaction in one of UNRWA’s health centers in Amman, Jordan. This was done by administering a short questionnaire to patients while they were waiting for their appointments at the clinic. My project was conducted in two primary locations: Amman New Camp health center, as well as UNRWA Health headquarters, which is also located in Amman.

One of the main reasons that I wanted to work on this project, besides that fact that I am a descendent of Palestinian refugees, is that I would like to pursue a career that combines both medicine and public health. Interning with UNRWA Health definitely gave me amazing insights into what it would be like to work in both of these career paths. My trips to the health centers offered some very interesting experiences in a clinical setting, while my meetings at UNRWA Health HQ allowed me to see what it would be like to work in a strictly public health setting. One of my favorite aspects of the internship was the weekly meetings that I attended at the headquarters, in which all the HQ health staff (which included doctors, statisticians, researchers, coders, and public health experts), as well as the director of UNRWA health, Dr. Seita, would update each other on the status of different projects and campaigns that were going on around UNRWA’s operational fields. It was fascinating to hear these experts discuss how the political environment in each of these different areas made it necessary to approach providing care to Palestinian refugees in different ways. For example, each of these different countries had different laws regarding the import of medicines which UNRWA had to work through. Another very important issue that was at the center of many of the weekly meetings was the new E-Health system that UNRWA recently created for use throughout all of the operational fields. This is basically a health database that all of the fields use to enter information about patients in order to streamline the exchange of information between different centers and HQ as well as to provide valuable data for research that UNRWA Health conducts. I was actually given access to this database in order to pull some demographic data for my research. I was also given a desk to work on throughout my time in Jordan in the same room as the doctors (who also happened to be expert coders) who created the E-health system. Since the system is new, there were several glitches as well as issues of miscommunication between headquarters and the different health fields that the staff were tasked with improving while I was in Jordan.

Overall, my project with UNRWA provided a perfect blend of experiences in clinical and public health settings that helped to shape my perception of these two fields and how I may want to incorporate aspects of both of them in my career. 

For more, please visit United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).