Each experience provided within Global Health is designed to help medical students become comfortable within the community health context of a developing country which has limited resources and access to medical care.
Medical students will achieve Community and Education Goals within 4 primary areas:
- Introduction to the local health care systems.
- Cultural issues and communication, including natural healers within bush medicine.
- Reading, research, and community education projects.
- Building on clinical skills.
The learning objectives facilitated through Global Health student experiences are:
- Recognize and appreciate cost-effective approaches to medical care in a resource constrained setting. Students will have the opportunity to practice medicine relying heavily on the history and physical examination with limited access to diagnostics, choice of medicines and hospital facilities.
- Demonstrate effective team-building skills with colleagues from multiple medical disciplines and with local health care providers.
- Recognize and treat illnesses common to those seen in the developing country.
- Recognize the delivery of health in a multi-culture region of the world while gaining an understanding of the country's political, cultural and historical context and their impact on health and health care delivery.
- Recognize prevalent cross-cultural and underserved issues in primary care, and gain an understanding of how this knowledge can be applied to a practice in the participants’ home country.
- Understand the benefits and challenges of working with communities and recognize strategies to overcome the challenges.
- Develop the skills, knowledge, and attitudes necessary to effectively work with communities to identify and appropriately access community-based resources.
- Understand and appreciate how psychological, economic, spiritual, social and biological factors interrelate to affect patient health.