Working in Global Health: Advice from PIH's Adam Bernstein

Starting a career in global health can be intimidating. It’s a diverse field that evolves quickly and demands collaboration across disciplines, from finance to supply chain and logistics, to computer programming.

Occasionally we ask a seasoned colleague to share advice for those interested in forging a career in global health. This month we asked Adam Bernstein, our web production manager, who’s been working on PIH’s communications team for two years.

I remember walking past many closed-door meetings at Partners In Health’s office in Boston in the fall of 2014, feeling that things were markedly different from the norm. The atmosphere was eerie and serious. PIH leaders had just announced that the organization would be aiding the effort to contain the world’s deadliest and most pressing health issue at the time: Ebola.

A daunting proposition in its own right, but it was especially true for me—a web developer and administrator, accustomed to the safe confines of a desk. I wondered how my role would be relevant in this immense and medically-focused public health effort. It seemed that my skillset had no obvious connection to global health until I was called on to help send clinicians to West Africa. We desperately needed to modify our web-based recruitment platform to hire clinicians to prevent the rapidly spreading disease. It was something I never imagined I’d be doing, but looking back, by following my interests, I’ve ended up in a fascinating intersection of web development and nonprofit global health work.

In 2006, I graduated from Northeastern’s College of Computer Science and had the great fortune of then finding work at Facing History and Ourselves, an educational nonprofit. I spent eight years there developing internal- and external-facing websites using everything from the outdated Lotus Domino to the then-new HTML5 standard.

I learned of PIH in 2010, when Haiti was struck by a 7.0 magnitude earthquake. I felt I needed to help in some way and asked around for the best organization to which to donate. Partners In Health kept coming up. Almost four years later, in December 2013, I noticed PIH was looking for a web developer. I was hired some months later.

I arrived at PIH without much knowledge of the global health sector. Like many others, my first real exposure was reading Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains. While settling in, I would steal chapters of the book at my desk during lunch breaks and became star-struck when I realized one of the main characters, Ophelia Dahl, sat in an office within eyeshot—a truly humbling and unique experience.

Working alongside the heroes of the field, even indirectly, opened my eyes to the meaning of doing selfless work to aid the poor. Quoting an experienced colleague and a personal mentor, Ellen Ball, “At Partners In Health, and many other nonprofits working to improve global health, it’s not about making the most money for shareholders and chasing bigger paychecks. It’s about social justice and human rights. The passion and dedication are indescribable.”

This attitude was never more apparent than during the Ebola crisis. PIH staff rallied together to do whatever was needed. Reconfiguring a recruiting platform wasn’t within my job description, nor were other tasks that colleagues had taken on. PIH’s recruitment platform wasn’t set up properly to handle the type of recruiting we needed to fulfill the demand for rapid deployment of skilled clinicians to West Africa. With no one to provide guidance and not enough time on my hands, I came up with an interim solution of “hacking” a totally separate system to handle employment applications. It was not ideal, but it worked long enough to allow me to enhance our main platform in the meantime. Within two months, we’d received more than 2,500 applications and recruited over 370 clinicians.

That was the moment I realized global health is about much more than just medicine. It’s about teamwork, selfless collaboration, and finding the not-so-obvious applications of your trade to make the world a healthier place for everyone to live.

Since then, I’ve continued to learn on the job in order to best serve my team and the organization. The best advice I have to give the aspiring web developer is to keep your finger on the pulse pulseof the industry and standards. It’s not only fun, but obligatory. And it’s an honor to be able to bring the best of the web world into the field of global health and to PIH.

I was eventually lucky enough to meet a few nurses recruited through the platform, who were in Boston for training. I asked what they thought of the process. Their response was along the lines of: “We actually chose PIH because the application was so easy to understand. We had a difficult time finding a place to apply until we saw yours!” I felt an immense sense of surprise, relief, and pride to have been a tiny part of an immense effort to treat those in great need. I can’t think of better motivation to stay with this work for a very long time.