One of the most fascinating parts of the internship so far has been watching our team dynamic form. As in all group projects, each of us brings a unique set of strengths to the table. However in this circumstance, the skills that each of us possesses is far more greatly varied than in any group I’ve worked in before due to our different backgrounds. The Malawian interns are rising fifth-years who have been trained exclusively at the Polytechnic, while the American interns are rising third- and second-years trained exclusively at Rice; we have four electrical engineers, two bioengineers, and one mechanical engineer; the three American interns have project-based design backgrounds through the global health technologies program and the OEDK, while the Malawian interns have far more extensive technical knowledge; four were born and raised in different parts of Malawi, two in Texas, and one in Colorado.

We are all coming from and going to different places, but have time now to delve into our shared interest of developing healthcare technologies. This gives us the unique opportunity to hear new ideas and perspectives, “piggy-back” off one another, get inspired, and continuously learn. Watching our team come together to form this special balance has I think encouraged all of us to begin appreciating the vast potential that collaboration creates, and wonder about the other mutually beneficial partnerships that are important to us and our programs—particularly between the Polytechnic, Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital, and Rice.

• QECH and Rice. The relationship between Queen’s and Rice has been established for years now. Queen’s played a significant role in helping to get the bCPAP (more info about this device on Tanya’s blog, another intern in Blantyre) off the ground, and sources many ideas for design challenges posed to teams of Rice students in the global health technologies program. The bCPAP office is stationed in Queen’s, and many nurses and doctors there are close contacts for Rice faculty. Conversely, when we visited Chatinkha (the neonatal care ward) last week, I noticed many technologies filling the ward that were developed through Rice for Queen’s.From a student perspective, the relationship between QECH and my university is a huge source of inspiration. It makes the projects we spend our time on in the global health technologies program real; they aren’t just projects given to us for purely academic growth, but instead are real problems that originate from a hospital that has exhibited a need. Students learn a lot from the hospital’s perspective, and can design more successful devices due to this. Additionally, the opportunity to work with a hospital like Queen’s is an invaluable experience for students pursing work in the global health field. The hospital, on the other hand, has more contacts that solely want to hear the pressing problems the hospital faces and attempt to make headway in solving them; there’s a ready pool of eager students, helpful faculty, and astute professors focused on innovating affordable technologies that the hospital needs.

• The Polytechnic and QECH. The first thing I noticed regarding the Polytechnic and Queen’s was the physical proximity of the two. Every day, Catherine, Emily, and I make the short, 10 minute walk to the Poly from the hospital, which are connected by a single road; you can even see QECH from some upper floors of the Poly. For engineers interested in medical technology design, this physical proximity is invaluable. The hospital will give students greater access to doctors, nurses, and many standard machines (or lack thereof) from which they can learn. If Queen’s is the source for new device ideas, the students at the Poly will have the opportunity to more directly involve the relevant healthcare workers at Queen’s in their design processes. Feedback and guidance is available a short walk away, which can advance technologies quickly. Additionally, there is a great probability that technologies developed for Queen’s with iterative and immediate feedback from doctors at Queen’s will prove to be more successful.The Poly will also be offering a biomedical engineering degree for the first time next year. Simply being in the wards and observing processes/practices has shown to be immensely helpful to Rice students, and I can imagine the same will be true for Poly biomedical students. Not only do you become more aware of constraints, but you can also find inspiration for new biomedical devices to help address observed needs.

• Rice and the Polytechnic. The potential for growth through this relationship becomes clearer to me every day through working with the Malawian interns. As I mentioned above, we all have varying, complementary strengths. We have different backgrounds as well as access to different materials and resources, which can be combined to lead to more appropriate, optimized devices. For Rice students, it is often difficult for us to fully understand the context for which we are designing medical devices, and it can be hard to get feedback from the intended users of our devices; however for the Poly students, this barrier is almost nonexistent. On the other hand, access to standards of care and design execution can be more difficult for Poly students that Rice students. Increased communication between students at these two universities has the potential to help all of our design processes immensely.We also have observed the potential for increased efficiency by working Poly and Rice students together versus individually: the first week, when we pulled out some of Rice’s device prototypes to hear feedback, the Poly students had pretty immediate ideas to improve the devices. These suggestions would have been even more helpful at earlier stages in the design process, so that they could be incorporated and tested early on. Similarly, when the same project is worked on at both the Poly and Rice—such as the phototherapy dosing meter—both projects would probably benefit from communication between the teams.

These three institutions each have a particular set of strengths that, like the interns, differs from the other’s capabilities. The relationships that develop open long hallways with a lot of new doors, and the more that I observe the team dynamic between us interns, the more attracted I get to the potential built into the relationships between QECH, Rice, and the Polytechnic. Moving forward, I think all of the interns are interested in utilizing our unique circumstance, in this unique team, to help in some way continue to forge the unique relationships that have so much potential to offer.