Moving ahead to the final goals ...

It has been a very productive two months for MEDICINE project, following the successful presentation at the MERC Congress in Edinburgh back in May (https://www.andeanmedicine.net/blog/medicine-dissemination-and-next-stag...). Much of June and July was spent in Spain where approaches towards the statistical and quantitative analysis of the survey data were developed and this aspect of the project is now at an advanced stage.

Part of the rationale of being in Spain was to follow up on important contacts made at the MERC Congress in Edinburgh, where health professionals from around the world gathered to present and share information and approaches to the management of the contemporary migration and refugee crisis.

I had discovered that the Andalusian School of Public Health in Granada (http://www.easp.es ) was at the forefront of developing training materials for practitioners who deal with first contact with refugees and migrants coming from the Middle East and Sub Saharan Africa, and had been engaged in EU funded projects orientated towards engagement with migrants and refugees. This represented an important opportunity to meet and discuss the upcoming third phase of the project, which aims to use information gained from the survey of contemporary indigenous peoples with an historical experience of population displacement and trauma and the ways they have adapted their health beliefs and practices (or not) to develop transferable health models and practitioner’s tools. Agreements have been made to collaborate, with important opportunities for the project to address this aspect of the work and to fulfil the overall goals by the end of the third year.

Returning from Andalusia, I had scheduled a visit to the UN Refugee Agency in Geneva to organise a meeting with relevant people responsible for developing approaches to policy setting in respect of the migrant and refuge crisis, which is another long term goal of the project. This was an important start to this final project phase and gives a clear idea on how to proceed with the development of the ‘policy tool’ in the last stage of the project. It felt like a landmark just to find myself in the building.

Another important milestone was the publication of the first formal article related to the first stage of the project where analysis of archaeological and ethnohistorical data was used to develop the second stage questionnaire of contemporary beliefs and practices. The article is:

• “Health beliefs, healing practices and medico-ritual frameworks in the Ecuadorian Andes: the continuity of an ancient tradition”: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/gIXYgHxr2jvxfmnpz9u6/full

The second ‘outgoing’ year on secondment to the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador is approaching an end, and then I will be returning to the UK and to the University of York - the Department of Archaeology and the Department of Health Sciences - to continue moving the project forward into its final stages.