When an epidemic emerges, it often crosses national borders, which requires doctors from various countries to collaborate to stop the outbreak and heal the sick.
Experts say that in an interconnected world, a good medical school education includes courses on global health issues and ideally allows students to do service learning projects in countries that lack adequate medical care.
“The main benefit we see is that our students are going to become doctors of the world, and they need to know what’s going on in the entire world, not just the United States,” says Thomas Coates, a professor of global AIDS research at the University of California–Los Angeles who has a Ph.D. from Stanford University and who oversees global health initiatives at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine.
Coates says global health issues ought to be integrated into core medical school classes, even those that aren’t classified strictly as global health courses. In order to understand the greatest challenges in medicine, Coates says, a doctor needs to have a global perspective.
[Learn how medical students can do service learning projects in international communities.]
Ideally, experts say, global health programs in medical schools address both health concerns that plague all nations , such as obesity, diabetes, and sexual transmitted diseases, and th ose prevalent in particular regions, such as tropical diseases and water-borne illnesses.
In addition, experts say, students should look for programs that address how ethnicity, location and travel frequency influence patients’ risk of acquiring specific illnesses. And, experts say, students should also seek programs that describe how health systems vary between nations and what experiments are being tried by doctors abroad that could be applied at home.
Dr. Joel Shalowitz, professor of preventive medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, says understanding how another nation’s health system works enriches your outlook on your own country’s health care system by allowing you to compare and contrast the two.
[Explore the reasons why overseas clinical experience enhances medical school.]
Faith Robertson, a third-year student at Harvard Medical School, says her global health project in Rwanda, where she looked into how often local doctors used minimally invasive forms of surgery to treat patients, was one of her most meaningful experiences in medical school.
Robertson discovered that surgeons in Rwanda rarely performed these procedures even though th ey are generally considered safer than invasive surgeries, because few doctors there were trained in non-invasive surgery.
A shift in the way surgeons are taught in Rwanda , she says, could increase patient safety and ultimately save lives.
“Before you ever want to make a change or discuss a change, you need to understand the problem or understand the current state of things,” she says. The power of global health research, Robertson says, is its ability to pinpoint problems in the international health care system so that those problems can be addressed.
Robertson says prospective students can get a sense of how highly a medical school values its global health program by seeing how prominently the program is listed on a school’s website and learning how generously the school funds fellowships in global health. Another important sign of quality , she says, is the amount of rigorous global health research produced by its faculty, and whether the medical school is a member of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health.
[Discover six signs of a compassionate medical school.]
Dr. Satesh Bidaisee, associate professor of public health and preventive medicine with the St. George’s University School of Medicine in Grenada and assistant dean of the St. George’s University School of Graduate Studies, says that because a doctor in the U.S. typically deals with patients who vary tremendously in terms of heritage, national origin and the extent that they travel, g lobal health issues are useful for any doctor who practices in the U . S . to understand .
“I always tell my students firstly that, as a physician, you in this world today do not decide which patient enters into your office,” Bidaisee says. “You cannot indicate which gender you prefer to treat or which ethnic background or which geographical location. In fact, anyone from anywhere can present with any health challenge, and as a physician, you must be competent and capable to deal with people of diverse backgrounds.”
A global health program can also teach how to leverage medical technology effectively, says Dr. Roy Smythe, chief medical officer with Philips, a technology company that sells healthcare devices.
Smythe, a former medical school professor with the College of Medicine at Texas A&M Health Science Center, says doctors in remote parts of the world are often pioneers in the use of medical technology, since they need to develop medical devices that are portable and inexpensive.
Learning about the innovative solutions doctors came up with in less-than-ideal circumstances can show medical students how to be creative, pragmatic physicians, Smythe says, and can also expose them to cutting-edge technologies that are transforming medicine.
Global health courses, he says, often give medical students insight into how to address medical problems in underprivileged communities in the U.S., since the health struggles of the nation’s poor are often similar to the health troubles experienced by people in developing countries.
“I’m very bullish on global health education,” Smythe says. “Health care is global. Disease is disease. There is nothing geocentric about illness.”
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Dive Into Global Health Issues During Medical School originally appeared on usnews.com
