Newcastle University

Cesme, Izmir, Turkey  9-12 December 2013

Organisation

Twenty-three participants attended this workshop, from all six of the RESCAP-MED Mediterranean partner countries.  The practical organization of the workshop, including the arrangement of accommodation, facilities, food and transport, were taken care of by the RESCAP-MEDTurkish team, led by Professor Belgin Unal and Dr Bulent Kilic.  Dr Shahaduz Zaman from Newcastle co-ordinated the workshop and sessions were facilitated by Dr Zaman and Professor Sjaak van der Geest from University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.  Professor Inci User, Bahar Taymaz from Turkey and Dr Fouad Fouad from Syria also facilitated one session each.

Apart from running the intensive workshop smoothly, the Turkish team organised a wonderful sight-seeing tour to the famous ancient Greek city Ephesus.  All attending the workshop owe a debt of gratitude to Belgin Unal and Bulent Kilic for making it such a success. 

Participants

Participants attended from 6 countries: 4 from Jordan, 5 from Lebanon, 2 from Palestine, 2 from Syria, 2 from Tunisia and 8 from Turkey.

Content

Medical Anthropology is among the largest and most vibrant subfields within the discipline of Anthropology, reflecting the centrality of health in people’s lives and the scope health and medicine provide for social scientific perspectives. There is increasing recognition that socio-economic and cultural factors have crucial influences on health and health care. What are the socio-economic and cultural factors which complicate treatment for chronic conditions like diabetes?  What factors contribute to the acceptance of community health financing or a vaccination program? What social and cultural factors should be taken into account to realize all ambitious plans to improve reproductive health care? What cultural assumptions of health care workers hinder or facilitate communication with members of the community?  What are the needs of the growing group of older people or psychiatric patients?  These are only some of the questions health professionals and health planners are confronted with. Anthropological research can be a tremendous support to health programs, by giving insights from the perspectives of recipients and providers of health programs and health care, and also by providing managers and implementers of these programs with mechanisms and strategies that could lead to a reorientation of health care programs and policies towards the actual needs of the target group.  NCDs in particular pose enormous challenges for health care, because of the need for long-term management of patients, and the importance of health professionals working with families.  In addition, such research helps health workers to reflect on their own role in public health and critically assess their contribution in the field of health and health care. The need for more insight in the social and cultural context of health and health care has been expressed by social scientists involved in multi-disciplinary health research projects, and public health staff at different levels of organization. Similarly, professionals directly involved in providing health education and primary health care and in implementing the health programs are confronted with difficulties related to the socio-cultural context in which they work. This workshop aims to address these issues.

Objectives

Participants who successfully completed this workshop would be able to:

• Understand the basic concepts of anthropology in general, and medical anthropology in particular;
• Understand the anthropological approach to public health;
• Comprehend the social and cultural realities of health and health care;
• Understand how medical anthropologists can work as part of an integrated multi-disciplinary research team;
• Understand the rationale for ethnographic and qualitative research methods used in medical anthropology; and be able to apply some basic skills of ethnography in relevant contexts.

Observations

Overall the workshop went very well, which is reflected in the comments mentioned below. It was highly beneficial to have Prof. Sjaak van der Geest, one of the pioneers of medical anthropology, as a facilitator of this workshop. There was active participation from the participants as well. However, the level of participation varied because of different levels of English language skills of the participants. Some had much higher proficiency in English than others, and inevitably they tended to dominate the discussion. We tried our best to balance this during our session facilitation. Participants of certain countries were particularly restricted in language skill and were therefore reluctant to participate in the discussion. In future, it would be useful to ensure that the participants have a level of English skill that allows them to participate in the discussion. We acknowledge that this is easier said than done, but it is especially critical where the discipline in question is qualitative and narrative in focus.

Although the participants were quite diverse in terms of their disciplinary background and level of experience, this did not cause a great problem, but rather proved to be advantageous as they all benefited from the exchange of ideas. In terms of the content of the programme the participants felt that more time could have been spent on methodological issues. Yet that had been a deliberate decision.  As this was a workshop on the basics of medical anthropology, and to our knowledge one of the first of its kind in the region, we sought to give priority to introducing the scope and value of medical anthropology and its conceptual tool-kit.  Moreover, we wished to convey something about its potential value when used alongside more established quantitative public health research skills in an inter-disciplinary research context, judging that it is in such a situation that our participants were most likely to be able to envisage its utility.  In consequence, we did spend less time on methods than on the themes and concepts employed by medical anthropologists in diverse settings.  Obviously in future the format could be rebalanced to accommodate more methodological issues.

The following table summarises the feedback of the workshop participants:

	Poor	Okay	Good	High
Your overall assessment of the workshop?	0	1	11	10
How far did you think the workshop met the objectives?	0	4	9	6
How well did you feel the workshop was structured?	0	3	10	8
Was there enough opportunity for your participation?	2	4	8	7
Were the exercises useful in demonstrating key messages?	0	2	9	10
How appropriate did you find the facilitation of the sessions	0	3	6	11
How good did you feel the venue/logistical arrangements for the workshop were?	0	2	6	13

Participant comments:

“I really appreciate the content of the workshop sessions as well as the organisation of the sessions and activities throughout the workshops. The topic of qualitative research and medical anthropology was very well presented and relayed to us as participants. I appreciate being given the time to discuss the various sessions and the content. Readings and activities were very useful as well. Thank you for sharing the PowerPoint presentations with us.”

 “With the workshop I have a new point of view for research.  Even I use [empathy?] in my daily life.  I had never thought that [empathy?] can be used in research.  I learned qualitative research is as valuable as quantitative research.  Thanks for everything.”

 “The workshop was good overall, however I would recommend more focus on methods as opposed to other topics.”

“More on ethics in qualitative research would be very interesting, especially in how to respond to scepticism about qualitative research. Overall extremely informative, fascinating and helpful.”

 “I learnt a lot from this workshop and I would like to go deeper and apply for a fellowship and later a research project.  One comment: I think the methodological part would have been better to do the 2nd and 3rd day when we were still at the optimal concentration, because it is so interesting and relevant and I had the feeling we rushed a lot on it today.”