Master of Public Health candidate Madeleine Burkholder Follows Global Health Passion to El Salvador

Madeleine Burkholder has always been drawn to global health and improving community health by empowering local members to identify and address health concerns in their own community.

While completing her ‘Applied Practice Experience’ at Saint Louis University, Burkholder followed her global health passion to El Salvador.

In May 2021, Burkholder began her internship at International HELP (International Health Education for Local People). The mission of the non-profit is to end all preventable diseases, with just two full time staff, interns, and volunteers.

“The importance of (community health) prevention correlated with what I wanted to do because I always wanted to go global. (So) everything was aligning towards public health versus medicine,” Burkholder, a second year M.P.H. candidate at the College of Public Health and Social Justice, dual concentrating in Global Health & Biosecurity and Disaster Preparedness, said.

While at International HELP Burkholder worked on the Texistepeque, El Salvador project where she focused on expanding existing community health worker training materials from past projects to fit the needs of the more rural communities surrounding Texistepeque.

Through her internship experience in El Salvador, she practiced, strengthened, and learned additional skills in a real-life setting outside the classroom.

“The point of the internship is to show how much harder it is in real life and how many moving pieces there really are,” Burkholder said.

During her time in Texistepeque, El Salvador Burkholder developed and implemented community health worker training designed for rural villages. The aim of the program is to train and empower local people in these communities as community health workers.

From the start of the project Burkholder was the project lead. While under supervision of the preceptor, she utilized skills gained from her first year in the program to analyze community health assessments, draft logic models and lay out plans for process and outcome evaluation.

From this, she produced training material on first aid, respiratory diseases, and preventable nutritional based diseases such as diabetes, high cholesterol and renal failure.

“It was really cool to see all of the virtual hard work actually come to fruition… confirming what I want to do with my life,” Burkholder said.

In January, a team from International HELP, including Burkholder, flew to El Salvador to implement the project and train 27 community health workers across two villages.

Community members took pre and post tests on the material to work toward certification. Members received a bag that contained a blood pressure cuff, stethoscope, tape measure, thermometer, first-aid kit and a binder of training materials in Spanish.

“I would love to do stuff like this, global health education is awesome, working with more of the vulnerable communities of lower literacy or lower access or limited access. I think it’s really neat how they do it,” she said.

The work done in Texistepeque is just the start for Burkholder and International HELP.

International HELP is planning on returning to the area later in 2022 to reach their goal of 140 active community health workers. Burkholder is wrapping up her Master of Public Health and is excited to start her professional career in the field of global health. 

College for Public Health and Social Justice

The Saint Louis University College for Public Health and Social Justice is the only academic unit of its kind, studying social, environmental and physical influences that together determine the health and well-being of people and communities. It also is the only accredited school or college of public health among nearly 250 Catholic institutions of higher education in the United States.

Guided by a mission of social justice and focus on finding innovative and collaborative solutions for complex health problems, the College offers nationally recognized programs in public health, social work, health administration, applied behavior analysis, and criminology and criminal justice.