Medical residency training in the U.S. rests on 100 years of history that sends new doctors to U.S. hospitals to learn the intricacies of their chosen specialty, from cardiac and cancer care to family medicine. What residency programs are learning is how to integrate global health into that training.
That’s where Janis P. Tupesis from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and Global Health Institute comes in. “The big push in a lot of disciplines is to integrate global health in residency training,” says Tupesis, an emergency physician, former UW Emergency Medicine residency director and current Graduate Medical Education-Global Health Institute liaison. “To develop new programs, you need to pay attention to how you go about it. How do we effectively and fairly partner with overseas medical groups?”
Tupesis explores those answers in two recent academic papers and a podcast released through the American Academy Emergency Medicine Resident and Student Association. He is also a volunteer technical consultant for the World Health Organization’s Emergency, Trauma and Acute Care Division, where he’s working on the division’s goal to create and implement an e-learning course. It’s based on the WHO Basic Emergency Care Course and will be available to tens of thousands of health care workers around the world.