In Conversation with Marc-David Munk.
In Conversation with Marc-David Munk
Dr. Marc-David Munk (SPH’99), who has worked in multiple healthcare roles as a physician and a healthcare executive, speaks with BUSPH Dean Sandro Galea about his book, Urgent Calls from Distant Places: An Emergency Doctor’s Notes about Life and Death on the Frontiers of East Africa.
At a critical juncture in his medical career, Dr. Marc-David Munk decided to step away from academic medicine for a short time and go where he felt his training as an emergency physician would do the most good.
He chose to assist Amref Health Flying Doctors, a non-profit providing Eastern Africa with medical evacuation services, and spent several stints as a volunteer flight surgeon on crews that traveled to remote and under-resourced parts of the continent. These were pivotal journeys in Munk’s understanding of the myriad duties of healthcare providers, which he recounts in a new book, Urgent Calls from Distant Places: An Emergency Doctor’s Notes about Life and Death on the Frontiers of East Africa.
In a conversation with SPH Dean Sandro Galea, who also worked for a time in East Africa, Munk discusses the difficulty in reconciling the differences between working to improve population health and his duties as a doctor helping individual patients.
“What I hadn’t appreciated at the time was that there is in fact an inherent tension between your roles as a public health worker and your role as a physician taking care of an individual patient,” Munk says. The tension between the two aspects of providing care arose many times during the medevac flights to remote parts of East Africa to evacuate ill patients, he says.
“Every time we would fly to some of these very basic rural hospitals, we would enter a ward where there were maybe 10 or 15 or 20 very critically sick patients in ward, and we were there to pluck out one of those patients.”
The importance of public health has long resonated with Munk (SPH’99). He and his wife, Dr. Martina Stippler, are principals of the Carlin Foundation, which has funded an annual pilot award at SPH since 2022 for innovative projects that help improve health.