A Place for All at the Global Health Table: A Case Study about Creating an Interprofessional Global Health Project

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Winter 2013

Keywords

Malawi Project, global health education, interprofessional education, health law

Comments

The publisher prohibits posting of the article to repositories and personal webpages. Access to the full text is available at the publisher's website: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1748-720X

Abstract

For the past four years, the Univer­sity of Maryland Baltimore (UMB) has sent an interprofessional team of students to Malawi in Southern Africa to research a complex global health issue with local counterparts. Students and faculty members from the six UMB schools participated in each of the six-week summer proj­ects. The initiative — now known as the Malawi Project — started with a big idea: to use the funds we had for individual travel grants to create a single global health learning experi­ence for students from all the schools on campus. Like most big ideas, we had only the faintest idea of what we were getting into and what the out­comes would be.

Now, four years into the process of fulfilling our big idea, we have a much richer understanding of the life-changing benefits and complex challenges of developing interprofes­sional global health learning activi­ties. We have also come to understand the scholarly gaps that need filling in terms of how to structure these activities with a greater degree of purposefulness and rigor. As the law school advisor for the Malawi Project, I have been in the unique position to conceptualize and operationalize the participation of law students in global health education. This essay is a reflection on the “why” and “how” of creating an interprofessional global health project, with specific focus on the challenges of incorporating law students into this type of educational activity.

Publication Citation

41 Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 907 (2013).

Disciplines

Health Law and Policy | Medical Education

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