What Is the Term for Medical Professionals Traveling to Developing Countries for Volunteer Purposes
Wellness Volunteers Overseas: A Model for Ethical and Constructive Curt-Term Global Health Preparation in Depression-Resource Countries
INTRODUCTION
Health care professionals from high-income countries are increasingly interested and engaged in brusque-term volunteer global health experiences in low-resource settings.1 These experiences may focus on direct service commitment, teaching and grooming, humanitarian relief work, or global health electives for medical students and residents, among other purposes. A growing body of academic literature addresses guidelines for upstanding global health engagement, merely there is little consensus on standards and scant evidence of the benefits and potential harms of the engagement efforts on host institutions and communities.two Additionally, much of the existing literature centers on the perspectives of "sending" institutions and clinicians, rather than the viewpoints and priorities of "host" institutions and practitioners.3
A wide variety of sending institutions engage in curt-term global health work. These institutions include charities, churches, or other faith-based organizations, universities, and for-turn a profit entities, and each employs defined operational models to achieve organizational objectives. For example, in the "fly-in medical mission" model, individuals or teams of wellness professionals volunteer to travel to underserved communities to provide dental care or health services that are otherwise unavailable, such as cleft palate repair or cataract surgery.iv While this model may deliver needed health services, it comes at a high fiscal cost, estimated at US$3.seven billion annually.4 Other potential bug associated with a straight service delivery approach, such as the wing-in medical mission model, include a high burden on host institution staff in resource-limited settings, ability imbalances and perpetuation of global wellness inequities, a lack of bilateral participatory relationships and longitudinal planning, and concerns nigh long-term sustainability and patient safety.five
In this article, I argue that a well-designed and upstanding global health engagement model that combines constructive volunteer management systems with mutually beneficial partnerships can maximize the potential benefits and minimize the costs, or harms, of such programs. Expanding on an article published in 2017 describing the Health Volunteers Overseas (HVO) partnership model,vi I discuss HVO'southward health workforce chapters building approach in low- and center-income countries (LMICs), focusing on the organization'southward unique brusk-term volunteer management structure, while considering its strengths, constraints, and implications.
HVO is a U.Due south.-based nonprofit organization founded in 1986 that aims to improve the quality and availability of wellness care in LMICs through teaching, training, and professional mentorship of the local health workforce. HVO deploys a curt-term, highly skilled volunteer model to reach its mission. Through HVO, more than than vi,400 volunteer wellness professionals have completed an estimated 11,500 brusque-term assignments in 55 countries, serving in 248 different grooming projects. Table 1 shows a summary of HVO'southward 2018 activities.
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TABLE 1.
Health Volunteers Overseas: 2018 in Numbers
RATIONALE
Global Health Workforce Shortage
In that location is a global shortage of wellness care providers, and it is estimated that information technology will attain 18 million past 2030.7 This deficit disproportionately affects LMICs, where the brunt of disease is highest and the ability to brainwash and support the health workforce is express. These environments do not have plenty health intendance professionals, few of the professionals have the opportunity for continued professional education or subspecialty training, and many piece of work in isolation with large patient loads and limited resources. The "encephalon drain," in which clinicians from resource-poor countries emigrate to higher-income countries, further exacerbates the shortage. Health worker functioning in LMICs likewise remains a claiming to delivering high-quality, evidence-based wellness care.8 Yet, a well-trained and appropriately deployed global health workforce is essential to achieving universal wellness coverage, economic growth, and the Un Sustainable Development Goals.nine – xi
Standards for Short-Term Global Health Appointment
Guidelines for brusk-term global health engagement typically start with the principles of beneficence and nonmaleficence,12 or "exercise no impairment," while also enumerating certain principles or recommendations. For example, a 2018 American College of Physicians newspaper identifies 5 positions, including predeparture training every bit an ethical requirement, in and of itself.12 A 2017 Pediatrics article summarizes ten recommendations for trainee and clinician grooming, including exploring personal motivations, avoiding "poverty tourism," and ensuring that professional goals are clarified and aligned with host goals. The authors telephone call for the establishment of preparation standards in partnership with both sending and host institutions.13
Guidelines for short-term global health engagement contain principles of beneficence and nonmaleficence.
An article from the host institution perspective, published in BMJ Global Health, addresses expectations for international visiting faculty including developing mutually agreed-upon goals and careful selection and preparation of guest faculty to see host's goals. The authors give the following instructionfourteen:
You lot plan the time the person should be hither and when he/she is needed most, and you plan the curriculum and the topics. So they also come prepared and send someone who is an expert.
Research from a 2018 Globalization in Health report defines the post-obit 6 core consensus principles for constructive and ethical short-term global wellness activities: (1) advisable recruitment, preparation, and supervision of volunteers; (two) host partner, who defines the program and their role in it; (three) sustainability and continuity of programs; (4) respect for governance, legal, and ethical standards; (5) regular evaluation of programs for impact; and (six) mutuality of learning and respect for local health professionals.i
The next section of this commodity focuses on how the HVO short-term global health engagement model operationalizes best practices, similar to the guidelines discussed above, in a systematized, effective, and financially sustainable approach. This arroyo has been replicated and adapted within HVO itself, enabling the system to grow from initially addressing just 1 area of clinical training, orthopedics, 33 years agone to xviii different clinical areas today (Tabular array ii). This model can exist implemented, in whole or in function, by other organizations or entities seeking to accost global health training needs in cost-constructive and upstanding approaches.
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TABLE ii.
Health Volunteers Overseas' Clinical Training Areas and Current Project Sites (2018)
THE HVO MODEL
Overview
HVO programs accost both the shortage of health workers and the quality of care delivered in LMICs by teaching, training, and mentoring health intendance providers, including kinesthesia, residents, and students based in hospitals, clinics, and universities (Supplement 1). Since its inception, HVO has focused on education rather than service delivery, although its St. Lucia site centers on clinical care provision. To achieve its mission, HVO sends highly skilled, short-term volunteers to teach in projects that are designed with host partners and clear clearly defined goals and objectives, as well as monitoring and evaluation processes. The organization's wellness worker capacity building approach is distinguished by three core attributes: efforts are teaching focused, volunteer driven, and partnership based.
The project promotes lifelong learning, partners with host institutions, and identifies and trains local personnel.
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Education focused: HVO is committed to providing didactics that builds health worker capacity and promotes commutation of noesis and skills between health intendance provider peers. It develops partnerships with host institutions that accost their long-term grooming needs and priorities. Project design is guided by local diseases and conditions, and the projects are relevant and realistic, focus on prevention (when advisable), promote lifelong learning, and identify and train local personnel who volition assume the roles of both educator and provider.
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Partnership based: HVO establishes ethical and mutually benign partnerships with host institutions—hospitals, clinics, and universities—to provide education, grooming, and mentorship. A ready of primal principles serves as the foundation of HVO's partnership model, including mutual goal setting, honest and open communication, equity, mutual benefit, active partner engagement throughout the project life cycle, flexibility, and clearly defined leadership roles. Another primal component is identification of a local champion who tin can inspire and motivate others, help maintain projection momentum, and guide partnership development.6
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Volunteer driven: Projection implementation is ensured by a pocket-size staff and a large cadre of volunteer health professionals, based both in the United States and abroad, who serve in clearly delineated roles. Annually, an estimated 600 volunteer wellness professionals serve with HVO as teachers, project directors, steering committee members, or on-site coordinators, supporting more than xc projects in approximately 25 countries. Roles are divers in HVO'due south Leadership Manual and Guide to Starting New Projects as well as in understanding messages signed with each site when projects are established.
Human being Resources Infrastructure
The HVO model has a unique and price-effective human resource infrastructure that assures projection management and oversight, enabling effective brusque-term global health engagement. Primal stakeholders include staff, volunteers, projection directors, on-site coordinators and steering committee members.
The HVO model has a unique and toll-effective human resource infrastructure that assures project direction and oversight.
Staff administer the volunteer management organisation, implementing processes to ensure timely and on-target projection activities. Staff serve as the communications, coordination, and support nexus for the organization.
Volunteers are fully licensed health care professionals from private practice and academic settings who teach, railroad train and mentor students, residents, kinesthesia, and other health care providers in two-week to one-month assignments, depending on the site. The almanac number of volunteers needed at each project site is assessed based on feedback from clinical leadership. HVO strives to place and send the requested number of volunteers and measures progress toward recruitment goals annually.
Some HVO project sites tin too arrange residents, if they are accompanied by a preceptor. Volunteers are responsible for funding their own airfare and accommodations although HVO has several grant opportunities to defray these costs including the Orthopaedics Traveling Fellowship and the Plotnick Nursing Pedagogy Volunteer Fund. Approximately 28% of 2018 volunteers received partial funding to back up their overseas assignments.
Project directors are experienced health professionals whose responsibilities include projection design and monitoring, volunteer choice and orientation, and technical oversight. They help prospective volunteers fix realistic expectations, understand site needs, and thoughtfully fix for assignments. Project directors submit annual surveys outlining accomplishments, challenges, and new initiatives, and they are expected to be in regular contact with their sites, including visiting, to stay abreast of of import changes and issues.
On-site coordinators are selected by host partner institutions for each projection. Some HVO project sites place both an administrative as well equally a clinical coordinator, who is typically a senior faculty member or department head. Administrative coordinators assist with visas, arrival arrangements, and housing bug, liaising closely with HVO staff. Clinical on-site coordinators identify training needs; approve, schedule, and orient volunteers; and provide feedback on both volunteers and evolving project needs through informal and formal mechanisms, including an annual survey. Their level of engagement depends on individual motivation and availability and thus varies from project to project, which tin can bear upon project quality.
Steering committees provide programmatic oversight for each of the eighteen clinical divisions. Each steering committee is equanimous of iii–10 volunteer health professionals who approve new projects and review existing projects (and, when appropriate, append or close projects); set up policy on the types of volunteers who can exist placed; assistance to recruit new members and volunteers; and programme workshops, meetings, and other outreach activities. Steering commission members are selected with input from HVO staff and current committee members, based on criteria such as commitment to teaching and training, availability to participate in ane or ii meetings per yr, and global health experience.
HVO volunteers, project directors, on-site coordinators, and steering committee members are volunteers who donate their time and expertise to the organisation, receiving no compensation for their efforts. In 2018, the value of services donated to HVO totaled approximately $six,743,500.
In 2018, the value of services donated to HVO totaled almost US$7 million.
Volunteer Direction System
Over 3 decades, HVO has developed —and continues to refine—a volunteer management system that enables highly skilled health professionals to make incremental but sustained improvements in the availability and quality of care delivered in low-resource settings. Each volunteer's teaching assignment contributes to stated project goals and objectives and builds upon the previous assignment. For instance, a team of 5 HVO volunteer nurse educators worked with nurses at Hue University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Vietnam who wanted to aggrandize their research capacity. Together, the nurses adult a 2-twelvemonth programme for their enquiry calendar, which included didactics about research methodologies, grant writing, and publishing in peer-reviewed journals. Each HVO volunteer nurse educator knew what she was expected to teach to advance the collaborative plan, and the Vietnamese nurses were confident in achieving their goals and advocating for needed resources.
In any given yr, 40% of volunteers have completed a previous HVO assignment. Some return to the same site, providing teaching continuity, while others volunteer at new sites. Repeat volunteers can besides share insights and techniques learned at one site and bring this data to new sites. In this way, HVO's short-term volunteers aid expand a network of professional person peers who sometimes continue to engage long after a volunteer leaves the host institution.
HVO is sponsored by eighteen professional associations (Supplement 2), including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and the American Physical Therapy Association. These associations provide invaluable access to their membership, which serves as a chief volunteer pipeline for our projects, while HVO provides sponsors with structured teaching and training assignments and the opportunity for their members to participate directly in their specialty's global health community.
Central Processes
HVO's volunteer direction system includes four key processes, as described below. An assortment of resources back up these processes, ensure quality implementation, and enable organizational learning. These HVO resources include the comprehensive Guide to Volunteering Overseas, Leadership Manual, Guide to Starting New Projects, and KnowNET, a password-protected intranet for volunteers and project directors that provides volunteer schedules, teaching resources, and policies on research and donations of equipment and pharmaceuticals.
Volunteer Application, Vetting, and Approval
Potential volunteers complete an online awarding and provide a curriculum vitae (CV), which HVO staff review to decide if applicants have appropriate credentials to participate in projects. Staff contact applicants to learn more about their motivations for volunteering, commitment to preparation and teaching, availability for assignment, and geographical or programmatic preferences. Applicant CVs are then shared with relevant project directors and on-site coordinators for review and additional follow-up, ensuring that all applicants are vetted by peer health care professionals with the technical skills and global wellness experience to evaluate their capacity to engage productively in HVO training projects. Before a final decision is made, project directors bank check bidder references.
Volunteer Scheduling, Planning, and Logistics Support
HVO staff work with approved volunteers to schedule assignments based on site needs and timelines, and volunteer availability. Nearly volunteers serve as individuals, although HVO coordinates a express number of team assignments for multidisciplinary projects (e.thou., spine surgery, wound direction, oncology) when advisable. HVO teams are ordinarily composed of 3 or 4 volunteers.
HVO staff provide significant planning and logistics support to volunteers throughout their engagement, significantly reducing the burden on both host institutions and the volunteers themselves. Increasingly, for example, host country ministries of wellness require visiting clinicians to register with national medical and nursing associations. Such processes are important simply as well time-consuming, requiring background checks and the submission of multiple documents.
HVO staff provide detailed instructions, assistance volunteers fulfill credentialing and registration requirements, and liaise with host personnel and volunteers throughout the procedure. Staff too work with volunteers to accost assignment logistics and orientation, which includes obtaining visas; assisting with questions about flying, hotel, and inflow arrangements; providing cultural, political, and historical information; and providing information on personal wellness and safety.
Professional person Orientation (Predeparture and On-Site)
Predeparture and on-site orientation for volunteers is provided by a network of HVO stakeholders, including staff, project directors, on-site coordinators, and, ofttimes, previous volunteers. Information, shared through electronic mail, phone, and Skype exchanges, addresses site grooming needs and priorities, partner institution structure, prospective trainees and their educational levels, prevalent local diseases and conditions, locally available resource (e.g., pharmaceuticals, diagnostic testing), and previous volunteers' presentations and evaluations.
Predeparture orientation may also include identification of specifically requested lecture topics to ensure that assignments align with host priority training needs. The HVO Guide to Volunteering Overseas and KnowNET (the HVO intranet for volunteers and clinical leadership) provide a range of information to help volunteers set up for their assignments, both professionally and personally. Once a volunteer arrives on-site, host faculty typically provide a curt conference, although the responsibility for professional person integration rests primarily with the volunteer. HVO emphasizes that it is essential for volunteers to prepare as fully as possible for their assignments prior to deviation because site-based staff are busy with their regular (and usually very loftier) patient loads, teaching, and family responsibilities every bit well as second jobs in some cases.
Dr. Jon Kolkin, an HVO orthopedics volunteer, summed upward the personal qualities essential for successful global health volunteers15:
… humility, compassion, patience and flexibility. … One must be willing to think creatively, look at a situation from multiple viewpoints and prefer therapeutic strategies to accommodate and respect local weather, cultures, techniques, politics, resources, educational backgrounds, demographics and social norms.
Volunteers' Evaluations and Recognition
Returned volunteers and multidisciplinary teams complete an online survey to evaluate several dimensions of their teaching and overall experience. Repeat volunteers to the same site complete a slightly different survey, which elicits their assessment of HVO'southward longer-term impact on the site. As needed and on a continuous basis, HVO staff reach out to volunteers to hash out their feedback surveys and share surveys with clinical leadership to address firsthand problems and make needed improvements in project implementation.
On an annual basis, projection directors and on-site coordinators complete a survey assessing projection achievements, challenges, and needed changes in project design. HVO staff collate and review these data, sharing with steering committees, project directors, and on-site coordinators to inform adaptations in project design and identify and address challenges and opportunities (Table iii and Tabular array iv).
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Tabular array 3.
Observations of On-Site Coordinators on General Areas of Comeback every bit a Event of Wellness Volunteers Overseas' Activities, 2018 Survey (N=65) a
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Table 4.
Observations of On-Site Coordinators on Improvements Due to Wellness Volunteers Overseas Training, 2018 Survey
HVO recognizes outstanding volunteers—based at both host institutions and those who travel to teach—with the annual Gold Apple tree Honor for infrequent contributions to HVO's mission. Recognizing exceptional service and commitment is essential in a volunteer-driven organization like HVO considering information technology expresses appreciation, establishes organizational role models, and encourages ongoing engagement.
DISCUSSION
Strengths of HVO's Model
HVO's model has of import strengths that enable curt-term volunteers to make incremental contributions to long-term outcomes at host institutions. The human resource infrastructure of this model is a unique combination of authoritative staff and volunteer technical leadership based both in the United States and at host institutions who piece of work together to support volunteer teachers and ensure quality programming and sustained bear upon. Strengths of the HVO model include effective systems to vet, corroborate, and prepare volunteers; opportunities for health leadership development and recognition; the opportunity to develop enduring professional person relationships; sustainability, cost efficiency, and replicability beyond a breadth of clinical specialties; and mutual skills transfer.
HVO's model has of import strengths that enable short-term volunteers to make incremental contributions to long-term outcomes at host institutions.
Volunteer Management Systems
Equally previously described, HVO has detailed volunteer direction processes to ensure that qualified and committed volunteers with appropriate general or subspecialty expertise are selected for projects, well-prepared for their assignments, and scheduled according to site needs every bit much as is possible. These systems enable constructive and ethical short-term global health engagement.
Toll Efficiency, Sustainability, and Replicability Across Multiple Clinical Specialties
While each project differs according to host needs and priorities, HVO has well-documented and efficient systems for partnership development and program monitoring that promote both sustainability and replicability, enabling HVO to explore new countries, clinical specialties, and educational approaches. HVO's annual operating budget is approximately $1 meg, primarily from individual donors, which enables a core staff of 12 to support clinical leadership, volunteers, and project sites. HVO'due south clinical expertise and leadership are provided by a cadre of more than 600 volunteer health professionals annually, which reduces costs significantly while also providing sustained support for the training of local health care providers.
Opportunities for Leadership Development
Throughout the arrangement's structure, volunteers fulfill a variety of roles to design, implement, and monitor training projects and to support other volunteers. HVO continuously seeks new leadership to fulfill these roles, offer opportunities for clinicians to broaden their professional feel.
Long-Term Collaborations
Strengthening health systems through teaching and training is a long-term endeavor. Health professionals in both LMICs and college-income countries alike need ongoing opportunities to strop their skills and larn new approaches, integrate new knowledge into their practice, and develop professionally. HVO establishes enduring partnerships with host institutions, some of which have lasted iii decades or more, enabling the growth of mutually benign and trusting relationships, the creation of a peer professional network, and promotion of opportunities for ongoing training, conference attendance, and research collaboration.
Mutual Skills Transfer
Many HVO volunteers study they learn more they teach, citing in particular the opportunity to acquire nigh unfamiliar or advanced stage diseases and health conditions, and the provision of intendance in resource-constrained environments lacking diagnostic tests, advanced equipment, medicines, and sufficient staff.
Constraints of the HVO Model
The types of potential ethical dilemmas inherent in the deployment of short-term health volunteers to LMICs are well-documented and are exactly the dilemmas that our volunteer management model are designed to mitigate, to the extent possible. The HVO model does present some specific constraints that merit exploration, including the post-obit problems.
Data Limitations
HVO'southward monitoring and evaluation system, including the information collection tools discussed above, effectively captures project-level data on achievements, challenges, and evolving needs. However, information technology is difficult to isolate the impact of either an individual HVO volunteer or HVO as a whole on a site, given the range of training inputs, including land-led expertise and the capacity building support provided by other outside actors, such as NGOs, universities, and hospitals. During the side by side ii years, HVO plans to develop several in-depth case studies to capture the touch of preparation efforts over time and to implement a trainee-specific survey.
While HVO's model is designed to foster progressive and sustained improvements, rapid and measurable gains in evidence-based patient intendance sometimes occur. In 2018, for case, a volunteer pediatric intensivist and pediatric resident in a Bhutanese hospital worked together to explore high mortality levels in infants in the pediatric intensive care unit of measurement (PICU) that had been attributed to acute encephalopathy. The clinicians postulated and later demonstrated that the infants had thiamine deficiency linked to infantile beriberi, leading to new standards of care in the PICU of that hospital and others in Kingdom of bhutan. Initial information from their written report showed that thiamine administration to these children led to a precipitous drop in babe mortality in the PICU (Box).
BOX
Case Report: Identifying Infantile Beriberi in Bhutan
This case study is a condensed version of a longer article published in the HVO summer 2019 newsletter, The Volunteer Connection, written by Dr. Dinesh Pradhan, Pediatric Resident, Khesar Gyalpo University of Medical Sciences of Bhutan (Thimphu, Bhutan), and HVO volunteer Dr. Christoph Funk, Pediatric Intensivist, Dietrich-Bonhoeffer-Klinikum (Neubrandenburg, German), with contributions from Dr. Leila Srour, Chair of HVO'southward Pediatric Steering Commission. Dr. Funk served in a three-month volunteer consignment in Bhutan in 2018, working closely with Dr. Pradhan and other pediatric care providers at the project site.
Bhutanese pediatricians at the National Referral Hospital in Thimphu were grappling with a perplexing problem in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU): infants who initially presented with nonspecific respiratory or gastrointestinal symptoms that rapidly progressed to acute encephalopathy and, within a calendar week, led to expiry in almost 80% of cases. Survivors had serious neurological sequelae.
Direction focused on treating them as "meningoencephalitis" cases with a possible viral etiology. They were treated with antibiotics, antivirals, anti-epileptics, and general supportive care, including nutrition, hydration, and ventilator back up, with poor results. Collaboration with the National Institute of Virology in India and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States to isolate a virus from the cerebrospinal fluid of these children was not successful.
After observing the survival of such a patient following Dr. Pradhan's administration of a cocktail of multivitamins, Dr. Funk analyzed the instance, postulating that thiamine could take been the key ingredient that made the difference. He researched the literature, which pointed to the possibility of these cases beingness "infantile beriberi" or thiamine deficiency.
Supported by the hospital'southward pediatrics department, Drs. Pradhan and Funk sought to bear witness their hypothesis. They adapted a protocol from an Indian study to administer thiamine to these children and observe for any improvements, collecting 1 year of data (Jan–December 2018). They compared xix children who had not received thiamine (Jan–July) with 32 who had received information technology (August–Dec). None of the children in the thiamine accomplice died, whereas 73.7% in the no-thiamine cohort had died. The doctors will seek to prove their empirical findings, merely based on their initial study, thiamine assistants to children with acute encephalopathy is now standard-of-care in the PICU.
Dr. Pradhan (with funding from HVO) and Dr. Funk presented their research on infantile beriberi in Bhutan at the 2019 Almanac Conference of the German Society of Tropical Paediatrics and International Child Health (GTP) and won the Helmut Wolf Award for their work, selected by a jury of scientists and clinicians.
Teaching Continuity
In HVO'south global health capacity building model, ensuring continuity between volunteer assignments is an ongoing challenge. Aligning the availability of a subspecialty volunteer with a host establishment semester-long curricula, for instance, tin can be hard. This kind of scheduling claiming can be mitigated through avant-garde and thoughtful planning and, potentially, a combination of on-site and remote teaching. Similarly, ensuring continuity of educational content betwixt volunteers introduces a complexity that is non e'er surmountable, although in potent collaborations between on-site coordinators and projection directors, this risk tin be mitigated.
Repeat volunteers are invaluable to host sites considering they can provide needed continuity, orient outset-fourth dimension volunteers, build and heighten trusting professional person relationships with host institution personnel, and develop a deep understanding of site priorities. Sharing lectures and presentations through HVO's KnowNET is another way of promoting continuity of training.
The "Failed Volunteer"
Although information technology is rare, some HVO volunteers are unsuccessful. Typically, these individuals are volunteers who, despite preparation, realize that they are not personally or professionally equipped to work effectively or to manage the stress of resources-express environments. They may unduly burden hosts or may interact in a disrespectful or unproductive way with host institution students or kinesthesia. Such volunteers are usually chop-chop identified past on-site coordinators or by other HVO volunteers serving at the site. Depending on the circumstances, HVO may non allow the individuals to volunteer with the organization again.
HVO's intensive volunteer vetting, approving, and preparation processes tend to screen out such individuals, but information technology is not always able to do so. We accept occasionally institute that unsuccessful first-time volunteers can become successful volunteers through the transformative experience of their piece of work with HVO. The capacity for and practice of personal reflection are key in these circumstances considering the individual can ultimately achieve "transformation, meaning and connection"16 through experience.
FUTURE IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSION
HVO presents a replicable model for ethical and constructive short-term global wellness experiences. Over more than 30 years, HVO has developed efficient and comprehensive volunteer management structures and systems that enable highly skilled volunteers to improve wellness workforce chapters in LMICs through curt-term teaching and training assignments. HVO'due south model integrates best practice guidelines for short-term global health engagement with well-designed training projects implemented through long-term, equitable, and mutually benign partnerships.
HVO presents a replicable model for upstanding and constructive short-term global health experiences.
An effective and ethical volunteer direction organisation also enables HVO to explore new approaches for education and training commitment that build upon the existing platform. In 2015, HVO launched the Wyss Scholarship for Future Leaders in Global Health to support the professional development and leadership skills of local health intendance providers at HVO projection sites. Thus far, 30 scholars from a broad variety of clinical specialties and countries have been funded to nourish conferences and participate in intensive grooming courses or observerships. In 2018, HVO sponsored the publication of an e-book entitled International Partnerships for Strengthening Wellness Care Workforce Chapters: Models of Collaborative Education in partnership with the open-access periodical Frontiers in Public Wellness.17 The e-book consists of 33 peer-reviewed articles submitted by 163 authors from 28 unlike countries, representing 96 unique organizations and institutions.
Recent programmatic innovations include select opportunities for longer-term volunteers to design responses to complex global health training needs in collaboration with partner institutions, and e-volunteering or altitude mentoring for activities such as curriculum development, research support, or leadership skills enhancement. New clinical areas have been added in recent years. For instance, projects in obstetrics and gynecology started in 2017, and HVO is exploring a broader approach to physical rehabilitation to build upon the concrete therapy program. Increasingly, HVO project sites request training in subspecialty areas such as neonatology, infectious affliction, nephrology, cardiology, and neurology, too as support for research. HVO is expanding recruitment to address these evolving site priorities.
HVO provides a well-structured and cost-efficient model for wellness professionals interested in sharing and building their skills and noesis to improve and aggrandize wellness intendance delivery in lower resources settings. HVO continues to refine and adapt our model to accost evolving global health preparation needs at project sites and to ensure ongoing alignment with core principles of ethnical and effective global wellness engagement.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Nancy A. Kelly, HVO Executive Managing director, for her inspiring leadership over more than thirty years. I also acknowledges April Pinner, HVO Director of Program Blueprint & Evaluation, for her co-authorship with Ms. Kelly, of "Wellness Volunteers Overseas: 30 Years of Leveraging International Partnerships to Strengthen Wellness Worker Capacity," upon which this article is based.
Notes
Peer Reviewed
Funding: No funding was received for this piece of work.
Competing Interests: None declared.
Cite this article equally: MacNairn EL. Health Volunteers Overseas: a model for upstanding and effective curt-term global health grooming in low-resource countries. Glob Wellness Sci Pract. 2019;7(3):344-354. https://doi.org/x.9745/GHSP-D-19-00140
- Received: April 22, 2019.
- Accepted: June 17, 2019.
- Published: September 23, 2019.
- © MacNairn.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Artistic Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC Past 4.0), which permits unrestricted utilise, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original writer and source are properly cited. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. When linking to this commodity, delight use the following permanent link: https://doi.org/10.9745/GHSP-D-19-00140
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Source: https://www.ghspjournal.org/content/7/3/344
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