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Atziri Ramirez has been working to reduce maternal mortality in her homeland of Mexico using her medical expertise, but now she wants to take a broader approach to tackling the problem.

She chose the MSc Global Health program as the vehicle to achieve her goal of improving maternal health in her country, where it continues to be a significant public health challenge. The program reflects her conviction that health is a multidimensional subject. “It doesn`t separate health determinants from other disciplines that affect it, such as economics and politics,” she says. “It also acknowledges the complexities of humans and societies.”

Ramirez has firsthand experience with the complex realities of health care in low-income communities. In 2004 she founded an NGO aimed at improving the quality of life in Tlanchinol, Hidalgo, one of Mexico’s poorest states. She ran it on her own for four years before realizing that she lacked the project management skills to make it sustainable. After graduating from medical school in 2010 and then specializing in obstetrics and gynecology, Ramirez joined the Geneva Foundation for Medical Education and Research (GFMER) in 2014 as the Mexican Representative.

The Foundation works closely with the World Health Organization to deliver health education and research programs to developing countries. Ramirez led several maternal health courses for health-care providers on subjects such as preeclampsia and postpartum hemorrhage. “We’ve trained over 400 providers in the last two years,” she says.

As a student in the MSc Global Health program, Ramirez looks forward to gaining a new set of skills to complement her medical knowledge. “I want to learn about the interaction of multiple factors in health to improve maternal health not from a narrow viewpoint, but from a global standpoint,” she says.

After graduation, she plans to continue what she started – but from a new angle. “I will go back to Mexico and work to improve maternal mortality and morbidity by increasing health providers’ training,” she says. While she hopes to maintain some clinical work, her ambition is to build a career in the field of project evaluation and policy-making by working with NGOs.

“I feel that medicine is a great way to improve a person`s life, but global health is a more efficient way,” she says. “You don’t help one person at a time, you help hundreds, even thousands, of people.”