The Institute for International Medicine is proud to announce the most recent graduate of INMED’s Master’s Degree in International Health (MIH). Dr. Susan Aycock has been practicing family medicine for 30 years in rural North Carolina, encouraging her patients to take a more active role in their own health as she oversees their well-being from birth through hospice care.
Dr. Aycock describes desire to practice international medicine as a lifetime goal, a joyful experience, and how her plan is to continue working with international underserved populations even beyond the MIH degree requirements.
This INMED Master’s Degree is a 32-hour credit program that combines advanced academic skills with real-world international field experience. The MIH program offers three specialty tracts; International Medicine, International Nursing, and International Public Health. Each tract is designed to equip the graduates with the tools necessary to lead health education and disease prevention in low-resource and cross-cultural communities. The Institute of International Medicines’ MIH degree is unique in the arena of advanced education, with low tuition, exemplary faculty, and most importantly, supervised hands-on experience at INMED’s Training Sites located in marginalized communities all over the world.
Dr. Aycock took her INMED International Service-Learning Experience at Clinica Esperanza, located on Roatan Island, Honduras. In that setting, she improved her physician skills while also empowering local people with the tools necessary to prevent, detect and treat cervical cancer. Now, attention to cervical cancer is a normal element of women’s health in North America, but seldom addressed in low-resource, international communities. Dr. Aycock’s MIH capstone – the creation of appropriate cervical cancer screening and treatment – has become just the next step in her “joy of this experience” to encourage health throughout the human experience.