Identifying Global Health Competencies to Prepare 21st Century Global Health Professionals: Report from the Global Health Competency Subcommittee of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health

Abstract

As universities increase their focus on global health-related professional education, the need for specific competencies and outcomes to guide curriculum development is urgent. To address this need, the chair of the Education Committee of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH) appointed a Subcommittee to determine if there is a need for broad global health core competencies applicable across disciplines, and if so, what those competencies should be. Based on that work, this paper (a) discusses the benefits of developing interprofessional and discipline-specific global health competencies; (b) highlights themes that emerged from a preliminary review of existing related literature; and (c) reviews the process used to identify two levels of interprofessional global health competencies.

Developing and validating learning domains, competencies, and evaluation items for global health clinical immersion practicums for graduate‐level nursing programs

“…Wilson et al. () explorative study of nursing faculty in North and South America became the template by which to allocate interprofessional competencies by levels of involvement (Wilson et al., ). In a follow‐up study (Jogerst et al., ), competencies for two of these levels (the basic operational level and the global citizen level) were completed by the Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH).…”

“…Many of these partnerships have involved students from high-resource countries (HRC) travelling to low-resource countries (LRC) for clinical practicums. The academic global health community and the nursing discipline specifically, have identified competencies needed by these students for successful partnerships (Brown, 2014;Chavez, Bender, Hardie, & Gastaldo, 2010;Clark, Raffray, Hendricks, & Gagnon, 2016;Melby et al, 2015;Rowthorn & Olsen, 2014;Wilson et al, 2012Wilson et al, , 2014Wilson et al, , 2016. However, heretofore the collection of these competencies has not been synthesized and delineated by educational level, such as Why is this research or review needed?…”

Capacity Development in an Undergraduate Nursing Program in Vietnam

“…The results were prominent for knowledge change in the healthcare system, function of the United Nations and WHO, and attitude change in cultural and global leadership. These global partnership programs were theoretically based on Wilson et al's (14) work on global health competencies.…”

The future of global health education: training for equity in global health

“…These new entities are often charged with defining curricular and co-curricular opportunities, and their leaders are contributing to the discussion of competencies in global health [12–14]. An intraprofessional education committee of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health is providing important guidance in this area [15]. A few schools are also taking a lead in the effort to disseminate this information without barriers, as exemplified by the freely available Global Health Delivery cases published by Harvard Business School, the open-access training modules by Unite for Sight, and all-access syllabi, readings, and taped lectures hosted by various U.S. universities or their open courseware partners such as EdX and Coursera.…”