Global Health RESPONDER™ Course
Why should I take this course?
“Global health is an attitude. It is a way of looking at the world. It is about the universal nature of our human predicament. It is a statement about our commitment to health as a fundamental quality of liberty and equity.”
More than half of the world’s population is denied access to essential health services (Tracking Universal Health Coverage: 2017 Global Monitoring Report). As a result, millions of lives are lost to preventable and treatable illnesses and injuries each year. Everyday, 16,000 children die before their 5th birthday from diseases like pneumonia, malaria, and diarrheal illness. 99% of maternal deaths and 87% of premature deaths from noncommunicable diseases occur in low- and middle-income countries (WHO, 2017). Even within high-income countries like the United States, socioeconomic inequalities generate health outcomes that parallel those of much lower-resource settings. New challenges, including rapid climate change and a record 70.8 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, compound these inequalities.
Addressing health disparities in any setting requires interdisciplinary education that focuses on community resiliency and ethical partnership with local stakeholders. If you are invested in helping others, the Global Health Responder™ Course will help prepare you to be a responsible member of the global community and an effective agent for social change, both internationally and at home. This program is particularly unique in that it combines both state of the art academic instruction with hands on field experience, which will result in global health responders exceptionally prepared for the unique and compelling challenges of this service.
What makes this international experience different?
First, this course will equip you with the skills you need to understand, evaluate, and critique the current status of global health. GECI’s renowned faculty have had experience all over the world and have more than 50 years combined experience in global health. The focus of this course is to teach you best practice and the current state of the art of global health engagement.
The Global Health Responder™ Course then creates opportunities for you to apply your knowledge ethically and in partnership with local organizations. Many international healthcare volunteer opportunities are designed to benefit the volunteer and not the host location. NGOs often focus on single health problems identified by the volunteer organization and lack a connection to the local health services. In contrast, INMED embeds individuals in existing long term health initiatives at the invitation of the local project. Volunteers remain in-country for at least one month to allow for increased cultural awareness and understanding.
I am not a healthcare professional, how will this help me?
The Wilderness First Responder training prepares you to function in a resource-limited context and trains you to improvise and adapt. Whether you serve in a response capacity in a natural disaster or desire to live and work in rural, under-resourced areas, having skills that allow you to take care of yourself and others is essential. The Global Health Responder™ program provides you with the toolset to apply these skills in a culturally appropriate way and introduces you to the complex challenges and ethics of working in less developed regions of the world.
Will this program help me get into school or get a job?
Increasingly employers and medical schools share concern over the proliferation of short term global health volunteering experience on a resume. The Global Health Responder™ program is designed to address these concerns by bringing awareness to these issues, emphasizing cultural competency, and offering an extended in-country experience developed and managed locally. Graduates of this program will be able to articulate why this experience is different.
What do I get at the end of the program?
When you complete all three modules and your final debrief, you will receive a Global Heath Responder™ certificate with the insignia of all three partners.