Letter from the Chief Medical Officer
Dear Colleagues:
With copious resources readily available to us, it can be difficult to imagine practicing medicine in a place without the most basic necessities: potable water, electricity and medications like penicillin. But, with a commitment to bring BWH’s high-quality care to some of the most disenfranchised people in the furthest corners of the earth, many of our colleagues are doing just that.
We have among us world-renowned Partners In Health founders Paul Farmer and Jim Yong Kim, whose resounding commitment to improving health care accessibility all over the world launched the Division of Global Health Equity (formerly the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities) at BWH. Their efforts foster the support and coordination of training, research and service to reduce disparities in disease burden and improve treatment outcomes in places with limited resources, including Haiti, Lesotho, Rwanda and Siberia, to name just a few.
In Emergency Medicine, the Institute for International Emergency Medicine and Health—among several other programs—offers training and exchange programs to improve emergency health care worldwide.
And this spring, Orthopedics and Cardiac Surgery kicked off long-term missions to the Dominican Republic and Rwanda, respectively. Chief of Cardiac Surgery Chip Bolman and Team Heart, a multidisciplinary group of volunteers from BWH, are bringing heart surgery to Rwanda and teaching staff at King Faisal Hospital how to create a self-sustaining cardiac surgery program of their own. Orthopedic Surgery Chief Thomas Thornhill founded the Boston chapter of Operation Walk, and this multidisciplinary team performed total hip and knee replacements on 37 Dominican patients in April at the Plaza de la Salud hospital in the Dominican Republic, where such surgeries are financially unattainable for many.
This spring, Harvard Medical International joined forces with Partners to become Partners Harvard Medical International, yet one more example of our shared mission to increase access to quality health care around the world. We begin a new series in this issue of MSN to highlight these programs, beginning with the PO’s volunteerism program with the Indian Health Service.
These efforts and many others at BWH, PHS and HMS present a challenging, humbling and rewarding experience that teaches us volumes about the human spirit and its resilience. What we have to offer to people around the world is tantamount to what we can learn from them.