On Saturday, March 27, 2021, the DKU Intramural Global Health Case Competition concluded with a special talk by Dr. Xiaohong Ning, who is a clinical physician and an associated professor in the Department of Geriatrics at Peking Union Medical College Hospital (PUMCH) as well as the leader of Hospice and Palliative Care team of the hospital. She was invited to talk at the Award Announcement ceremony because her work and research was directly relevant with the case prompt in the 2021 DKU Global Health Case Competition, which was “Palliative Care in China”.

Palliative care can be defined as the care provided to the terminally ill and their families in order to ease the pain and suffering that is experienced by both sets of individuals. This topic is increasingly relevant and important today, because of China’s rapidly aging population. Each team had to take a role as an internationally recognized public-health consulting firm to advise government health officials on how to best improve the quality and implementation of palliative care in different locations in China. We had a total of six teams or over thirty participants joined in this pilot-scale inaugural competition this year. The winning team was Team 404 Team Name Not Found. Congratulations to Yunyi Ru, Daianji Liu, Yuchen Ling, Yiyang Weng, and Xiwei Huang, who delivered a thoughtful and well-designed palliative care program for China.

The Global Health Case Competition was one of the components organized as part of the Global Health Youth Leadership Program. Another important component of the program was the Global Health Seminar Series, where we invited professors, researchers to share with us about their successful projects and programs. Our featured guest speakers for the year’s series were Prof. Shenglan Tang, Prof. Truls Ostbye, and Prof. Allan Burns from Duke Global Health Institute, Duke-NUS Medical School, and the University of Florida, respectively. We are grateful for all kinds of supports from DKU’s Global Health Research Center and Student Affairs Office and are looking forward to organizing this competition again in the future.