With a growing portfolio of projects and partners at UCSF and around the globe, Global Health Sciences is launching the Global Maternal Newborn Health Cooperative in an effort to build a collaborative team to better leverage, encourage and support the strengths of researchers and clinicians across UCSF.
The Cooperative will bring together researchers and clinicians passionate about maternal and newborn health from departments across each of the schools at UCSF. The Cooperative will provide a mechanism to facilitate and the infrastructure to enable collaboration with anyone who shares its principles of cooperation and mutual benefit.
“Team work, collaboration, partnership are all words we use to describe our goals and aspirations. The problem is that actually collaborating, partnering, and working together in a meaningful way is really hard to do,” said Dilys Walker, MD, who will lead the Cooperative. “Global work has a unique set of challenges and requires a special environment to flourish. It’s simply too hard, too expensive, and too isolating to keep building separate research islands. The Cooperative offers an alternative model to conduct research.”
As with any co-op, the model is dependent on all members contributing to and benefiting from the resources and activities. Each individual is expected to provide a unique contribution and benefit in a meaningful way. The Co-op will serve varied stakeholders, from clinical faculty with a small, but growing interest in global research to full research faculty looking to strengthen and expand the depth and breadth of their research portfolio. The Co-op will be designed to allow for varying levels of engagement.
A team at GHS, which includes Dominic Montagu, DrPH, MBA, MPH, Georgina Lopez and Hannah Park, is working on developing the Cooperative’s charter and operating guidelines and plans to formally launch in December 2016.