Global Health Education Programs in the Americas: A Scoping Review

Abstract

Introduction Global Health (GH) refers to issues that transcend borders and national governments, demanding actions from global powers, which determine the health of different communities [1]. It involves knowledge, teaching, practice, and research on extraterritorial health issues which extrapolate national geographic borders [2]. GH teaching involves integrated courses, which can be offered within social sciences, considering the transnational aspects of health issues [3, 4] while valuing the context and local capacity to act. In the Americas, the interest in GH as an academic discipline has increased in the last decade. This is due to the growing acknowledgement of GH as a fundamental issue in health training, enabling undergraduate and graduate students to better understand the global priority agenda and its demands [5]. Human resources are central aspects for the success of GH strategies; however, there is no consensus on how to plan experiential activities to prepare students to act locally and globally and to serve as global health professionals. Furthermore, cultural diversities in the Americas (North, Central, and South) enrich GH teaching and may become a challenge for the different actors involved in these processes. This study aims to analyse approaches, characteristics, and challenges faced by educational programs on global health in the Americas. Methods This is a scoping review, with the aim of mapping relevant scientific production and gaps on a specific theme, in this case, education of health professionals [6], following this sequence: 1) identifying the research question; 2) finding relevant studies; 3) selecting the studies; 4) organizing the data; and 5) collating, summarizing, and reporting the results, according to The Joanna Brigs Institute for Scoping Reviews. The search strategy used was PICo (P: problem/population; I: intervention; Co: context), in which P: educational programs on global health; I: approaches, characteristics, and challenges; Co: Americas. This resulted in the following research question: What are the approaches, characteristics, and challenges faced by educational programs on global health in the Americas? The inclusion criteria were: primary studies, full text available in Spanish, Portuguese, or English and published up to November 2017. Book chapters, Master's and doctoral final reports, as well as other technical reports were included in the initial search. Data collection took place between November 2017 and March 2018.

A Systematic Review of Global Health Assessment for Education in Healthcare Professions

“…The results of this review expand the knowledge on global health in current literature. A recent scoping review by Costa Mendes et al described the diversity, structure, models, emotional, cultural, and collaborative aspects of teaching global health in the Americas [ 125 ]. In this review, the authors recommended more consistency and standardization in educational approaches, echoing similar sentiments to a previous systematic review of global health graduate medical education by Bills and Ahn [ 88 ].…”

Anti-Racism and Anti-Colonialism Praxis in Global Health—Reflection and Action for Practitioners in US Academic Medical Centers

“…Academic Medical Centers (AMCs) play a unique role in the US global health landscape, falling at the intersection of clinical care, research, policy, and medical education, and their faculty and trainees engage in many global health partnerships-with increasing frequency. 4 Despite this prominent role, we find that not all global health programs at AMCs have critically interrogated their position within the ill-defined field of "global health," 5 or what the term "partnership" does or should mean in the social, historical, and political context of global inequities. Yet all global health practitioners must be deliberate in how they engage in the work, question their practices, and actively work to be anti-racist and to "decolonize" global health programs, not only as an ideological but also a pragmatic commitment.…”

Knowledge management: connections for teaching research in undergraduate nursing

“…Nursing progress is conditioned to its ability to collaborate with the development of societies based on meeting people's health demands (1)(2) . For this reason, it is important to consider the complexity underlying their objects of interest, given that nurses are able to involve, in their work process, the contextual specificities in which they are inserted, without, however, decontextualizing the local phenomena of their global relationships.…”

“…Thus, it is pertinent to consider research as a process of high social value, as it is a condition for conceiving and developing science (5)(6) . Therefore, the development of research skills is also a field of interest for nursing, since it is necessary to consider the relationship between science and social changes based on the exercise of the profession based on updated scientific knowledge (1)(2)5) .…”