BusinessTN

As recently as the 1970s, Iraq offered what was probably the best medical care available in the Middle East. Now, an unsupported education system has put the country 20 years behind the times. Civil wars and divided loyalties left the mountainous region of northern Iraq and Kurdistan without any cohesive system for training medical personnel and delivering health care.

In the early 2000s, the U.S. State Department, in an effort to improve the situation, identified East Tennessee State University, with its facilities and the Quillen College of Medicine, as having an appropriate expertise in health care delivery in a rural mountainous region. As a result, the State Department tapped the university to assist and modernize health care delivery in Iraqi Kurdistan. Fifty Kurdish doctors and administrators traveled to ETSU in 2002 to participate in a training program on the structure of American medicine. They took that information back to their region and made structural changes in their medical education and administrative delivery systems.

"In April of 2004, three of us from ETSU traveled to Iraqi Kurdistan to tour the facilities," says Dr. Martin Olsen, an obstetrician/gynecologist. "I went with Bruce Barringer, who works out of the president's office at ETSU, and Saresh Ponnappa, a medical librarian, and we saw facilities that now have Internet access, computers that our State Department helped set up in their medical schools, and clinics and rural hospitals with attending medical students."

According to Olsen, the money from the State Department grant was soon depleted, but ETSU remained interested in providing assistance. The Medical Alliance for Iraq was founded with the help of the State Department, a group of interested physicians, and a group of Kurdish businessmen. Since 2007, Olsen has traveled to the region several times.

The physicians who Olsen meets are devoted to their patients. While more than half of the practicing physicians have left Iraq, those remaining behind face kidnapping attempts and are at a high risk to be murdered. Nonetheless, they stay and work to provide better health care to their fellow citizens. "The high effort expended for survival along with the chaotic environment creates a situation where up-to-date medical knowledge is hard to obtain," he says. "They are thrilled when we arrive to teach them ways to take better care of their patients. In addition to knowledge, we also bring hope."