Danika Barry discusses the value of improvement for the most important stakeholders - patients and communities
Danika Barry, a student at Harvard Medical School and a former health care improvement fellow with the USAID ASSIST Project and the Quality & Performance Institute at Univeristy Research Company, LLC., spoke to Salzburg Global, underscoring the value of direct patient interactions in the scope of improving and evaluating health care systems.
Barry spent several years working with community-based primary health care programs in India, Uganda and later Ethiopia where she became involved in the field of quality improvement in particular, whilst working on a project titled: Maternal and Newborn Health in Ethiopia Partnership.
“It was a pivotal time in my career trajectory, because it was a way of seeing how communities themselves can really lead changes that were important to them and also have ownership over the data collection, evaluation and analysis processes, and I think that shift in power is what was really so key to that project’s success. The direct focus on systems which is so key for quality improvement was also very appealing to me.”
Through an increased perspective of the changes occurring in communities due to work to improve access to quality care and scale-up complex interventions, Barry saw the critical role that front-line clinicians play in developing and developed nations alike.
“It lead me to want to become deeply immersed within health systems as a care provider and then I think for other reasons, I wanted to be directly engaged in care provision and working with people and patients as it led me to understand what the key challenges were.”
As she transitions to a new role as a direct care physician, her participation in the session comes at a unique inflection point: the completion of her first year of medical school. Barry says, “some of the reflections that I have so far: a much deeper appreciation of what it might be like to be a frontline worker, so someone who is on the frontlines implementing changes and someone who is a key stakeholder immersed in a complex system. I have also been able to learn a lot more about the patient perspective by being able to spend so much time directly with patients, talking with patients about what their concerns are, what their hopes are and what they value in their care and I think that is an absolutely essential perspective.”
While many in the health care improvement and evaluation field were first and foremost direct care providers and then later evolved into roles addressing intervention and methods of quality evaluation, Barry’s perhaps reversed experience has led to her interest in working in the intersections of clinical practice, research and policy.
“There is this sense of urgency or even impatience that I feel among the Fellows and I think that is actually really positive because it forces us to make sure the questions that we are asking are relevant and that the solutions that we try to come up with will be relevant to the ultimate stakeholders, and those are our patients and our communities.”