Building a successful Global Health curriculum: advice from a fellow trainee

Abstract

Global health is an interprofessional collaboration to improve population health and individual clinical care worldwide. As interest in global health increases and educational programs respond to this growing interest, there is a need to re-evaluate the strength of rapidly growing global health training programs. As many other education systems move to competency-based training, so too should global health. Competency-based training focuses on the ability to perform a task, understand a concept or approach a problem with the appropriate attitude successfully.^1–3 Much of the old model of global health education is content-based and emphasizes number of training hours completed. The Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASPPH), the leaders of the competency-based educational effort, believes that global health education should be outcome-oriented.¹ Outcome-based global health education will ensure that trainees are better equipped with the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed to enter the global health arena. Goals of global health programs should include competency-based curricula implementation and an emphasis on core competencies that span all disciplines related to global health. Developing these cross-disciplinary global health competencies has been an ongoing project of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health’s (CUGH) Global Health Competency Subcommittee for the past year. The Subcommittee members have collaborated and developed core competencies for two trainee levels of global health involvement. From this experience of competency development comes the inspiration for a trainee-led movement for the successful implementation of these competency sets. Trainee-driven global health curricula will encourage programs to shift their standards from hours invested to skills, knowledge and attitudes acquired. If done across all global health disciplines, this will ensure that all professions have the competencies needed to work together on achieving the collective goals of global health.