Global Health
Global health at home and abroad
As family medicine clinicians serving a diverse and low-income population in the urban core of Boston, we have a strong interest in providing accessible, high-quality and patient-focused healthcare to families around the globe. Through our research we seek to develop new models of care delivery that more effectively and equitably serve all people at home and abroad.
Our global health research focuses on strengthening primary health care systems in low- and middle-income countries around the globe, with the goal of achieving better health outcomes for all populations, including recent immigrants and refugees within the United States.
We collaborate with a number of organizations outside of the United States to support the development of educational programs that provide training and competency-building for local teams of practitioners to provide comprehensive primary care services to all.
Research areas include:
- Strengthening the primary healthcare system: Through the Global Health Collaborative, our team is committed to improving health access and primary care services for the underserved in low- and middle-income countries. We partner with governmental and non-governmental organizations, universities, and institutions in global settings to strengthen health care systems by developing policies that promote primary care education and global health equity. We also partner with public universities to educate and train the primary healthcare workforce through medical education reform. Future health care leaders are trained to be champions for primary care and research and evaluation on primary care development.
- Preconception care: This ongoing work educates young Black women on how to improve their health before conception with the goal of improving pregnancy outcomes.
- Developing global health competencies for family medicine residents to better address local health: The goal of this work is to develop and implement competency-based multidisciplinary global health education curricula intended to increase Family Medicine residents’ self-reported confidence and readiness to apply principles of global health to our culturally and linguistically diverse patient population.
- Improving health care access and equity for immigrant and refugee patients: This work aims to improve health access and equity for immigrant and refugee patients, many of whom are non-literate or non-English-language speakers, by quantifying access gaps and eventually determining what interventions would be most helpful in reducing barriers to health care access and improving health outcomes.
- Lesotho-Boston Health Alliance: This long-term alliance focuses on strengthening human resources systems in nursing and medicine in Lesotho. With support from more than 20 funders, we established a Lesotho-based Family Medicine postgraduate specialty-training program, the first accredited physician training program ever in the country. The program recruits Lesotho-born physicians to return to their home country. The alliance now runs the national medical internship program, and has expanded training to other medical specialties.