Joining the dots between the classroom and hospital

This week we caught up with Dr Mona Ibrahim. A medical Doctor from Sudan, Mona has just started her new role as a Research Officer at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at Oxford University after the successful completion of the Masters in International Health and Tropical Medicine.
Mona, who describes herself as “a happy human, with a touch of sarcasm”, gives us a snippet of her life in Oxford, the differences in the learning cultures and her vision in ensuring universal health coverage is a reality in Sudan.
Mona completed her medical degree from the University of Medical Sciences and Technology in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. As part of her training, she took up a life-changing internship at the Um-Dawanban hospital in the outskirts of Khartoum.
The Um-Dawanban hospital covers the town of Um-Dawanban along with four villages in the area, providing medical facilities for a population of 500,000 people. A community with distinctive features from the other predominantly inhibits each village. Mona experienced a beautiful diversity of cultures, traditions and beliefs within the simple building of the Um-Dawanban hospital.
Mona treated patients with nutrient deficiencies, common infections and some who had injuries from road accidents.
However, one thing that stood out for Mona was the clear discrepancies between what she had studied and what she was observing at work.

The gap between the ideal and the reality became Mona’s career-focus and she decided to apply for the MSc in International Health and Tropical Medicine in Oxford.
The MSc in International Health and Tropical Medicine is a full-time one-year course that explores a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to health in resource-limited contexts. The aim of the course is to develop an understanding of the major global health problems in resource-limited settings and study potential solutions from different disciplinary perspectives such as the ethics, social determinants of health, mathematical modelling and economical evaluations.
The diverse student network of the course, leadership and communications training provided and international placements offered were particularly attractive to Mona.
Moving to Oxford for her graduate studies was an adventure in itself for Mona. It was the first time she was living by herself amongst other lifestyle changes. The student-led learning and emphasis on critical appraisals was quite different from her previous training, and the college system was both novel and confusing. One of her toughest challenges to overcome in Oxford was the need the match the high expectations and to fit in.

However soon Mona learned to question things like people’s positions, contextual factors and even her own opinions and inherent biases. She learned to embrace her quirky self and to keep pushing to become a better version of herself.
Since completing her degree, Mona has started working as a Research Officer for the UKRI GCRF Accelerating Achievement for Africa’s Adolescents (Accelerate) Hub embedded in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at Oxford University. Supported by the Global Challenges Research Fund, the aim of the Adolescent’s Hub is to improve outcomes for 20 million adolescents in 34 countries across Africa. Mona is responsible for the Hub’s engagement with the United Nations Development Program to ensure that policy makers consider the evidence provided by the Hub.