Medical Missions 101

Vertical and horizontal approaches to health have some fundamental differences. Vertical programs often have a preventive focus but they stem from a curative care model. As such they employ a western problem solving approach, and are often disease or health issue specific, such as AIDS or malaria. In essence, they

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PLA Participatory Learning and Action has long been the foundation of best practices in community development. However, I believe it has practical application across all cross-cultural and global health work; in the community and in the hospital.

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The best single resource for learning and understanding Community Based Health Care (CBHC) programs is a book entitled Setting Up Community Health Programmes: A Practical Manual for Use in Developing Countries by Dr. Ted Lankester. It is available in the US through the Hesperian Foundation (see www.hesperian.org). In Chapter 1

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In early 2004, my wife, Candi, and I joined Mercy Ships, an international hospital ship program that at that time also facilitated community-based projects while the ships are in port. We turned to using health development program models to design short-term land based global health initiatives after joining. Re-developing the

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The experience of life in the developed world is very different from that of the developing world. How can western health educators understand the lives of the people they serve? They need personal knowledge of the daily challenges that people in the local community face.

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When I write a post like this it should be said I am not preaching from Sinai, at one time I violated every patient safety guideline listed here. It was only through concerted effort to study global health work and medical missions over many years did we grow in our

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I have been going back and forth between addressing issues related to short-term and long-term medical missions, in this post I want to talk about this something I believe all short-term medical mission programs are concerned about to some degree, that being medication safety and adverse drug reactions. The idea

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There seems to be a growing passion for educating and discipling national healthcare professionals to serve the rural areas of their own country. We love this concept, and it has become central to the identity of CHSC; most CHSC missionary physicians are involved with clinical education in one form or another. But jumping from being a US-trained general surgeon to an African bush surgeon is an arduous process.

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