The Pride of a Teacher

Kevin Schulman

Kevin Schulman

Published April 17, 2014, last updated on April 9, 2018 under Voices of DGHI

By Kevin Schulman, MD
Faculty in the MSc-GH
Professor of Medicine and Business Administration

It was great to welcome Dr. Muhammad Pate back to Duke last summer.  He is a 2006 graduate of the Fuqua School of Business. Rather than give him a much needed vacation after his most recent service as Minister of State for Health in Nigeria, we put him to work designing a new core course for the MSc-GH program on Global Health Care Systems.  The issue Muhammad and I wanted to address was the role of the private sector in emerging market health care systems, and the relationship between the public and private sectors in health care in these markets.  Further, we needed a framework to help students assess health care systems across many different countries. Muhammad set about developing a novel framework for assessing health care systems, a framework that served as the outline for the class, and is supporting his work with the Lancet Commission.

We wanted to design a course that would be engaging and challenging for the students so we developed a case method class similar to ones I had used in business school classes.  The only issue is that we needed cases which illustrated specific topics in health care systems while giving students exposure to different health care markets around the globe.  Over several months, we were able to assemble this material.  We studied health care in countries with centralized and decentralized systems, in countries with cash payment schemes and those with insurance schemes, we addressed accountability and conditional cash transfers, and we discussed research and societal ethics.  Along the way, the students studied the structures of business plans, discussed a marketing effort to distribute bed nets in Tanzania, and discussed the politics of health care reform in Ghana.

In leading this class, it’s been great to see the engagement of all of the students- in class, through questions, and in written assignments. They’ve really been a great group.  

I really wanted to thank Muhammad for the opportunity to work with him this year.  The pride of a teacher in their students is second only to the pride of a parent.  However, it’s really rare to be able to work so closely as colleagues with a former student.  It has been a great experience for me.