Medical tourism = medical voyeurism
- assumption that you can go to developing world and have an impact
- have a service mentality
- it's like outsiders coming to a trauma bay just to see amazing things
- exotic
Motivations
- travel
- experience
- resume
- work with and for communities
- going abroad to learn things that you're actually going to use?
So...
- good intentions are insufficient to warrant a trip
- humility that other ways sometimes work better
- consider each trip as entirely an educational experience, and attempt to have an experience with as little impact as possible
Assessing the impact and known harms of visiting healthcare professionals
- Often ineffectual
- steals resources from domestic learners and volunteers
- because you need community support, that community support requires person power
- can drain the systems they visit
- does your presence create a drain on the healthcare system (interpreters etc)
- lots of energy to get visiting people up to speed
- undermine local professionals by creating the appearance of higher quality care
Preparation
- often a majority is fundraising instead of culture and language training
- standards should remain the same, if you don't have the training, don't do it, you can always make things worse
- must be prepared to resist opportunities that exist without structured learning experiences (cowboy medicine)
So why do it?
- a good doctor can adapt to any condition
- a doctor is not just a doctor of their country, but a doctor of people who live in different countries
Aiming for sustainability
- Only those who learn the language, spend years, and partnership
- Cooperative partnered collaborative where both sides gain
- donor recipient relationship abolished
- long term vision
- not a gap to fill, financial/knowledge transfer useful
- what can we learn from you?
- what can we do for you? (not help)
Minimizing the harms
- pre-departure training
- cultural sensitivity
- humility
- organized structure with goals and limitations
No such thing as global health, it's just health
- how can you serve health to people in different places
- what are we doing and why are we doing it?
- challenge our place in global health
