Case Studies

Today we had our second round of case studies. Groups looked at issues ranging from the two child policy and how that affects womens reproductive health to the effects of street food play into the health of the Hanoi population. My groups over the past 3 days have been reseraching Health Seeking Behaviors of rural and urban populations. We interviewed doctors, and a scholar on urbanization. We also traveled to a rural area to interview the people. We returned to the National Traditional Hospital and talked with some patients seeking health care there as well. Our main goal was to assess how social networks affected the health seeking behaviors of these different groups. In short we found that people in urban areas felt like they had less social support than those in rural areas. In many cases rural people will accompany those who are sick to hospitals. The flip side of this though is that the urban population has much greater access to health care, on average it takes 5-10 minutes to seek care while rural people may have to travel anywhere from .5-2 days to get care. It is a very interesting topic and we only touched the surface of the issue.

Tomorrow our group travels to HaLang bay for the night. We will be sailing on a boat around the coastal islands of Vietnam. On monday we will leave Hanoi and go for a week to a rural home-stay where we will continue classes as well as gain perspective on the health and lives of rural Vietnamese.