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Paul Farmer, MD, PhD, remembers the first time he heard "AMC" referenced when he was a new medical student at Harvard in 1983. He assumed the reference was to the movie theater chain.
For Farmer, however, "AMC" came to mean an "area of moral clarity"-a basic need, or moral obligation, to treat the sick and destitute people desperately in need of care in Haiti.
"AMC, I came to learn, also means academic medical center," said Farmer, chief of BWH's Division of Global Health Equity. "I wondered what on earth an academic medical center had to do with the problems of the destitute sick, even in our own country-much less places like Haiti, Rwanda, Malawi or Lesotho. And the answer back then was: not nearly enough."
But in the coming years, a group of forward-thinking physicians and hospital leaders would change the status quo by establishing the Division of Global Health Equity as part of the BWH Department of Medicine. The division became a formal academic home for global health, making remarkable progress in patient care, research and education in underserved communities around the globe.
Farmer reflected on these changes and achievements at the division's 10th anniversary celebration on Feb. 19. He was joined by luminaries including Jim Yong Kim, MD, PhD, president of the World Bank; Donald Berwick, MD, MPP, former administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services; Ophelia Dahl, executive director of Partners In Health; and BWH President Betsy Nabel, MD, among many others.
The celebration's guest of honor was Howard Hiatt, MD, the division's first deputy chief and its current associate chief, and an early mentor of Farmer and Kim.
"Dr. Hiatt once told me, ‘You'll make me proud if you do something that makes the world more just and fair,'" Kim said. "Through mentoring so many of us, he has bent the arc of history towards justice."
In 2004, the division established the Doris and Howard Hiatt Residency in Global Health Equity, preparing young leaders for the still-emerging field of global health. "I could not be doing the work I am today as a fellow without the experience I had as a resident," said Natasha Archer, MD, MPH, who recently graduated from the program. "Howard Hiatt is a constant champion for the underserved and reminds us that whatever we're doing, there's still more to be done."
Throughout the years, the division has improved community-based health care in Rwanda, increased support for people with diabetes in the Navajo Nation, trained community health workers to support HIV/AIDS patients in Boston and constructed a national teaching hospital in Haiti, to name just a few accomplishments.
"The division has produced a shift in how academic hospitals view global health and the responsibilities hospitals have to the global community," said Sonya Shin, MD, MPH, who has been part of the division since its inception.
View a photo gallery from the event.
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