Our 2019 Boston INMED Courses – hosted by Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Global Health – last week brought together nurses, pharmacists, physicians, and public health specialists from five countries: China, Sudan, Haiti, Antigua, and the US, including Puerto Rico.
This is a truly inspiring phenomenon to witness: educated, visionary, and well-to-do healthcare professionals bent on increasing their skills to go back home and serve their own people. One of the most needed skills is also rarely addressed in healthcare education: how to assess community needs and resources, and then to design appropriate health interventions – ones that take into account local culture, economic realities, government policy, human resources, and the myriad of other factors necessary for an organization to function.
INMED addresses this shortfall through both supervised online study in health leadership and through hands-on in-classroom simulation of community health survey and strategy development exercises. The coming months watch for these graduates’ bold steps into their communities as they translate their new skills into action on behalf of humanity.