The Global Health Equities (GHE) residency track is an initiative designed to:
- Provide educational opportunities that will nurture and train health professionals who want to focus their careers on addressing health disparities domestically or globally.
- Promote physician advocacy and service through working with our community and global partners to improve health care and medical education in our partner sites.
There are four major components of the track:
Didactic Curriculum
Recognizing that patients and health care providers are constrained by the socioeconomic and political context in which they work, this program strives to include education on the inequities and structural barriers that are important factors in the creation of health or disease for many populations around the world.
The components of the Didactic Curriculum are:
- 2 week JAR seminar: core block for track residents in PGY2 that explores contextual issues in global and community health and examines different strategies used to address health disparities. Also included are simulation cases and skill sessions in bedside ultrasound, microbiology, and ethical challenges.
- Online Curriculum: a web-based curriculum with both self-guided modules on the epidemiology and clinical aspects of major diseases, bioethics and clinical unknown cases.
- Resident Report Presentations: each resident leads a Resident Report about a topic on which s/he is working. The topic may be drawn from residents' scholarly project, their abroad experience or their community continuity site work.
- Career Building: faculty provide on-going mentoring and support for residents as they develop their career plans, making connections and defining goals for a career in global health.
- Invited lectures and discussions: in partnership with the Penn Center for Global Health in the School of Medicine and CHOP’s Center for Global Health, residents attend seminars and meet with invited guests to campus.
Clinical Experience:
- Global Electives: each resident will be able to spend 4 weeks abroad in the PGY2 year and 4 weeks in their PGY3 year. The PGY2 year is focused on clinical care, whereas the PGY3 time abroad may be either clinical or, where appropriate, spent working towards the resident’s scholarly project goals in areas such as clinical research, QI, policy/advocacy or medical education. Currently, the GHE track is working with sites in Botswana, the Dominican Republic (Med/Peds), Rwanda and the Indian Health Service. The goal is for the program to engage in long-term relationship building that will allow mutually beneficial exchange of ideas and capacity building for both partners.
- Community-Based Clinics
In addition to the residents' primary continuity clinic, GHE track residents work in a second continuity clinic site focused on medically underserved communities in Philadelphia.
Sites include:
Scholarly Project
All internal medicine residents complete a scholarly project, and residents in the GHT select a topic relevant to global or community health equity. The format for the activity itself is flexible and can range from clinical research to policy/advocacy, quality improvement, curriculum, or a community service project.
Career building and Community
Recognizing that many residents who choose this program are looking towards careers in global health, this program supports residents to develop on their career path through mentorship, conferences and connections. The global health program aims to foster relationships between program participants and experts in the field of global health and alumni of the track. The GHE track group also gets together at social events, reports, campus lectures, and potlucks to have informal discussions as well as present and workshop their projects.