Sari Taha

Fellow

I was born, grew up and studied in Palestine. I studied medicine and worked as a medical doctor at UNRWA, an international organization that provides essential healthcare services and public health campaigns for Palestinian refugees in the Middle East.

Throughout the past years, the Palestinian healthcare system has been largely reliant on international aid, rendering it fragile, under-resourced, and in constant crisis. Meanwhile, the existing structure implies that the problem lies in policy making with a leeway for improvement in case suitable expertise becomes available.

Missing link

Throughout my work as a part of the healthcare staff, I came to notice a missing link between those who run the processes at the lower level of the management hierarchy, and those who are at the top, making management arbitrary and ineffectual. The knowledge and skills that I will gain during this Masters programme will make me more competent in channeling human and financial resources into real public health needs through wise management. As a result, a more robust system is conceivable—one where targets are clear, management is effective and funding is sustainable.

The knowledge and skills that I will gain during this Masters programme will make me more competent in channeling human and financial resources into real public health needs through wise management.

Cultural effectiveness of health promotion

Another topic that I want to learn more about relates to the cultural effectiveness of health promotion. Recently I was involved with several campaigns to the refugee population, especially after COVID-19 started. Aside from the mass hysteria that the pandemic has brought on, we struggled how to set up health campaigns.

Challenges were how to set up campaigns for a population with different cultural characteristics. How should we work on health promotion taking into account people’s understanding across different sociocultural backgrounds? I very much look forward to learn about health management and policy, where an intact approach is followed to discuss ambitious ideas in a collective context, while simultaneously putting emphasis on the cultural aspect, which I myself find a priority in international health.