News Archive

UWA Medical graduate Sam Brophy-Williams, the 2012 John Monash Scholar, is on his way to Harvard University in the United States to study a Masters of Public Health. Here’s why…

By Sam Brophy-Williams

Three patients.

On a smoky, jungly, hazy morning in Freetown, Sierra Leone, I held a baby named Justus. He was 18 months old, but looked like a tiny old man, with the stick-skinny arms and bloated belly instantly recognisable as Kwashiorkor malnutrition. His mother had brought him from Kono, the eastern, wild country of Sierra Leone to the nation’s only children’s hospital, Ola During, hoping we could help with her baby, who she could barely afford to feed, and was now refusing what food she could offer, and passing watery diarrhoea. Justus died two days later, his malnutrition having sapped normal child-like reserves to fight the gastroenteritis he had caught from the unsafe drinking water in his village, and his country’s health system able to offer little more than gastrolyte and mealy meal.

afternoon in an Aboriginal community in Western Australia’s remote East Kimberley, I met a young man called Jimall. He was fourteen, and in the last two years three boys around his age had commited suicide in their tiny community. Jimall was brought by his grandmother to see us, and was quite deaf, the result of recurrent and poorly treated ear infections as a child. He could not read or write, and was often in trouble with the police in the community, having turned to sniffing petrol, perhaps from the frustration of his inability to communicate, his isolation, his seemingly hopeless situation.

Last year, at a Perth teaching hospital, I met Nancy. Nancy was previously a pillar of her community, as a teacher then an active retiree. She is now essentially housebound, almost bedbound, in agonising pain from an impinged nerve in her lower back. With no family, she is alone, depressed, degraded and desperate for the operation to relieve her pain, for which she is on a waiting list, and has been for almost a year.

Three patients, all of whom I remember vividly: leading examples of how public health, seen sometimes as the realm of monitoring, of inactivity, of irrelevance, is ever more important and urgent.

Thanks to the John Monash Foundation, I’m heading to Harvard this year to undertake a Masters in Public Health. Public health measures, though less glamorous than daring surgeries or bold experimental therapies for individual patients, carry with them the weight of numbers. The idea of providing clean drinking water to a hundred thousand Justus’, of having place programs for medical problems as frustratingly simple as ear health in indigenous communities to change the course of the future for hundreds of Jimalls, of managing health systems such that all patients like Nancy get the treatment they need in a humane and dignified timeframe – these things excite me, and these things are where I believe I may apply what talents, dedication and compassion I have to offer for the greatest benefit to Australia and the world.

The main issues in public health facing Australia are common to much of the developed world. In Indigenous health, the gap between all measurable health parameters for indigenous and non-indigenous Australians is a yawning chasm. In mental health, community contact and support networks are atrophied and strained, where they existed at all. In surgical specialties, waiting lists are growing, or being cut back only by bureaucratic language and obfuscation. “Lifestyle” diseases are killing more Australians than ever and show no sign of slowing their advance. In the developing world, child health continues to flounder in the world’s poorest countries.

Preventable diseased like malaria, malnutrition, and vaccine-preventable meningitis still end far too many young lives. Public health efforts in the developing world are hindered by, among many other factors, lack of funding, corruption and logistical barriers.

My personal area of interest is in infant and child health. Starting out with Uni Camp for Kids (a venerable UWA institution!) and continuing with paediatrics experience in Perth’s leading teaching hospital, in Sierra Leone, and in remote desert communities in the Kimberley, I have fallen in love with the limitless potential in every child. To help a child’s life and to alter the course of their future for the better is to change the world for generations to come, to make a lasting difference.

Heading to the world’s leading public health school is the next step in gathering the tools and knowledge to make changes that matter, providing unparalleled opportunities to meet directly with world leaders, brilliant minds and compassionate hearts; true experts in the area who have already been instrumental in effecting the sort of changes which improve health for vast numbers of people, the sort of changes and programs which we all hope to bring to people in need in Australia and elsewhere.

I can’t thank the John Monash Foundation enough for the scholarship which will allow me to take this next step – I only hope I can give them, and Australia, a worthwhile return on their investment!

Published in Uniview Vol. 31 No. 3 Spring 2012