Sun, Sea and Serious Business Have you ever wished you lived on a tropical island like the Maldives? Perhaps even thought about what working there would be like? We all know a little bit about what working in healthcare in the UK is like, but don’t often know much about it outside the UK. Sarah, who is currently studying her masters in Epidemiology at Bristol had a fascinating role before commencing her studies with us. She first studied a bachelor’s in health rehabilitation in Australia, before joining the public health sector of Maldives under the WHO. She was kind enough to share with us a little about her life in Maldives and what working in such an influential role in public health was like.
I understand you are studying a master’s in Epidemiology at Bristol, what made you want to join Bristol Medical School? One of the main reasons I applied was because Bristol was part of the Chevening scholarship scheme, which allows international students to study in the UK. I wanted to study epidemiology for a while because of my job. We are a very small country and when it come to higher education, especially health related, we have very few opportunities. You either have nursing or public health, whereas I was hoping to study a more specific course like Epidemiology. Chevening was how I could get there. Obviously, Bristol has a great reputation, especially when it comes to health research. A bonus was that Bristol itself is a beautiful city.
What was your role in the ministry of health? I manage the national emergency and health preparedness program, and I have been doing this since 2017. It is a very rewarding job, but it is a very busy job as well, you had to be on call 24/7. Even when emergencies that weren’t directly health related like fires or flooding occurred you had to be prepared to coordinate the health sector. When the Maldives emergency operation system was established in February 2020, I was a leader in the contact tracing team. I used to supervise all the contact tracing teams under the guidance of health prediction agency. I worked in contact tracing till September 2020, and then this year I started working with the vaccination campaign. Getting all the data from the island was a part of my role, it was very different from other parts of the world because we are all islands. Then, I transitioned back to contact tracing in the smaller islands. At a point we were getting about 2000 cases daily within a population of 400,000. We had to separate our contract tracing, so we had to separate sections between smaller islands and Male, I worked with establishing a system for atolls (the smaller islands in the Maldives) as our old system got so overwhelmed (we actually had to revert to google sheets at one point – we ended up setting up a google sheets for each island). I’ve worked in different areas of the response so far it was an interesting experience – I don’t think it’s one that anyone else could’ve gotten.
Prior to your role at the Ministry of Health in the Maldives, what roles did you work in?
I finished my bachelor’s in health and rehabilitation science in Australia. My degree was focused more on allied health, but we had one module around health promotion and public health in our last year. When I went back home there was no scope for allied health as we
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