Abstract
The globalization of healthcare has had a significant impact on healthcare delivery and human workforce development in many countries. Consequently, many educational institutions have had to revise the content of their medical curricula to focus on training and preparing future doctors to effectively cater to the needs of the “modern patient”. The focus covers broader aspects of medicine that include environmental and professional culture and the impact of socioeconomic inequalities on the delivery of healthcare. Therefore, in most global health (GH) education programs described, students undertake a specific part of their clinical rotation in a foreign (non-western) educational setting to facilitate authentic learning experiences within a resource-constrained environment. In this paper we present a unique Global Health program for medical interns between the University Medical Center Groningen, Netherlands and the Sint Elisabeth Hospital, Curaçao, Dutch Caribbean that has, for more than 50 years, been providing a one-year internship program as part of the formal Groningen curriculum. The program we describe, illustrates the essential requirements for best practice in GH education that fully complies with recently proposed GH program objectives and competencies. The characteristics of our long running program show the basic requirements necessary for sustainable and successful health education collaboration between institutions in high- and low/middle income countries. Finally, this program, which is part of a Dutch medical curriculum, not only provided unique global health learning experiences for the interns, but importantly also contributed to improving the general healthcare delivery services on the island of Curaçao as well.
Highlights
Introduction of competencies based curriculumImprovement of competency based curriculum in the CaribbeanCritical assessment of health practicesImportance of quality of education process maintenance; collaborative efforts with international medical institutes crucialCaribbean culture trainees felt better prepared as health care managerSuccessful implementation in a resource limited environment
We describe the characteristics of a unique global health (GH) education program within a resource-limited environment in the Caribbean
A significant proportion of the medical specialists (46%) currently working in St. Elisabeth Hospital (SEHOS) are products of the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG)-SEHOS program for residents and interns and have played important roles in developing tertiary care departments (e.g. neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) for premature and severely ill newborns, hemato-oncology unit and a dialysis unit for the effective treatment of end-stage renal disease patients) in SEHOS thereby contributing to healthcare improvement efforts on the island
Summary
250 patients on Hemodialysis 60 patients on Continuous Ambulatory peritoneal dialysis Active kidney transplant program with >100 patients treated viding insufficient value/benefit for the host institute/country.[27,28] As described well-designed and structured medical education programs can be a sound basis for successful collaboration[28], as judged by the quality of the experience of the trainees, improvement of in-country care, infrastructure and health capacity expansion.[7,9] A comparison of the characteristics of the UMCG-SEHOS program with the proposed critical components for a successful collaboration[28] is presented in Table 5.
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