Medical students returning from their global health trips often discuss about their experiences including patient information, health condition, photos, and test results that are supposedly shared only with the patient’s family members. This encompasses a significant risk for the patient in terms unreasonable exploitation of their medical condition and an apparent violation of professional ethical standard (IFMSA 1). This is just one of the concerns that arises in international global health experiences that make skeptics to question whether it does more harm than good. A month before summertime kicks in, university bulletin boards are crowded with posters inviting forward-looking students to spend their vacation volunteering in international services instead of soaking under a hot sun and sand. Global health experience became common in 2012 according to the survey of Canadian and American medical students where nearly 30% of senior college students participated in different international volunteer initiatives (Kraeker and Chandler). The idea of global health experience is to constitute self-advancement on the part of the students because it provides them a real life taste of what their profession is about to offer. However, there is an apparent notion of exploitation in the idea of global health (Shah and Wu). For one, volunteer services are being held in most vulnerable and depressed regions of the globe. This includes poor areas in third world countries (Shah and Wu). It is almost that vulnerable societies and individuals are being used as mere stepping-stone for personal advancement instead of rendering services for the sake of humanitarian terms.
There is a need for understanding community input particularly in participating to any international development organization. In some cases, the global health organizations conduct humanitarian efforts in the form of medical missions in remote communities. However, due to the surface observation of the community’s condition, the efforts expands to other initiatives such as building wells for clean water. This added initiative was due to assumptions that children in the community were not able to attend school on a regular basis because of the need to scour nearby areas to secure potable water for their families. However, this is not always the case because chances are, the children were not able to attend school because there was no school in the area in first place or the nearest one is about a couple of miles on an up and down mountain hike. Extending the supposed to be straightforward initiative into other objectives weakens the focus of the mission and that is to improve the health condition of the remote area and instead of making more water wells it could have been better if the extra agenda was geared towards building a learning center or establishing a rural clinic. Furthermore, one short term spent in an under-privileged community is not merely enough to establish sustainability. Therefore, engaging in short-term volunteer work in an international global health experience does is not long enough to justify benefits to the deprived communities, but the learners themselves alone. Probing and developing sense of accountability is more important in taking humanitarian roles.
Works Cited
IFMSA. "Global Health Information Privacy and Protection Statement (GHIPPS)." IFMSA Policy Statement (2013): n. pag. Print.
Kraeker, Christian, and Claire Chandler,. "“We Learn From Them, They Learn From Us”: Global Health Experiences and Host Perceptions of Visiting Health Care Professionals." Academic Medicine 88.4 (2013): 1-5. africa.upenn.edu. Web. 27 Nov. 2013. <http://www.africa.upenn.edu/asc/welearnfromthem.pdf>.
Sha, S, and T. Wu. "The medical student global health experience: professionalism and ethical implications." medicine.ubc.ca 34 (2009): 375–378. J Med Ethics. Web. 27 Nov. 2013. <http://www.medicine.ubc.ca/files/education/postgra/IHP/Medical%20Student%20Global%20Health%20Ethics.pdf>.
