Accessing healthcare is a minefield for the average American. How much more difficult is it for the forcibly displaced?

Around the world, millions are forcibly displaced by conflict, climate change, and persecution. In a continuation of our Healthcare and Humanity Reading Series, co-sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Center for Bioethics & Health Law, City of Asylum welcomes author Muhammad Zaman to share his recently released work We Wait for a Miracle: Health Care and the Forcibly Displaced. In We Wait for a Miracle, Muhammad shares poignant stories across continents to highlight the health care experiences of refugees and forced migrants. 

In moving stories that span seven countries—Sudan, South Sudan, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Colombia, and Venezuela—Zaman shares the everyday struggles of refugees, the internally displaced, and the stateless in accessing the health care they need. He finds that barriers to health care share these key factors: trust, social network, efficiency of the health system, and the regulatory framework of the host environment. A combination of these factors explains difficulties in accessing health care across the geographic and geopolitical spectrum and challenges the existing global public health framework. This unique look at an urgent global challenge addresses the issue of access for populations that are currently in distress due to civil war, economic collapse, or a conflict driven by external state factors.We Wait for a Miracle combines personal and journalistic accounts of refugees with broad systemic analysis on global health care access to compare problems and solutions in different regions and provide holistic policy and practice recommendations for refugees, internally displaced persons, and stateless populations.

This reading is followed by a moderated conversation with Theresa Brown, as well as an audience Q&A and a book signing. You can purchase your own copy of Muhammad’s book, We Wait for a Miracle, at City of Asylum Bookstore.

About the Author:

Dr. Muhammad Zaman is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute professor of Biomedical Engineering and Global Health at Boston University. He received his master’s and P.h.D from the University of Chicago. In addition to five books and over 140 peer-reviewed research articles, Professor Zaman has written extensively on innovation, refugee and global health in newspapers around the world. His newspaper columns have appeared in over 30 countries and have been translated into eight languages. He has won numerous awards for his teaching and research, the most recent being Guggenheim Fellowship (2020) for his work on antibiotic resistance in refugee camps.

About the Moderator:

Theresa Brown, PhD, BSN, RN, is a nurse and New York Times best-selling writer who lives in Pittsburgh. Her third book, Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient, was released April 2022. It explores her diagnosis of and treatment for breast cancer in the context of her own nursing work. Theresa has been a frequent contributor to the New York Times and her writing has appeared on CNN.com, and in The American Journal of Nursing, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Theresa has been a guest on MSNBC Live and NPR’s Fresh Air. Theresa has a BSN from the University of Pittsburgh and a PhD in English from the University of Chicago. She lectures nationally and internationally on issues related to nursing, health care, and end of life. Becoming a mom led Theresa to leave academia and pursue nursing. It is a career change she has never regretted.

About Your Visit: 

The in-house restaurant 40 North is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, but a cash wine bar will be available.