Family Medicine Global Health Fellowship
General Information
The Global Health Fellowship seeks to train family physicians to become leaders in global family medicine by training them to be clinicians, advocates, community health scholars and teachers locally and globally through equitable local-global partnerships
Length of training: 2 years
Domestic Sites
Family Health Center of Worcester – FQHC serving diverse patient population with a large refugee community. Immigrant and Refugee groups include patients from: Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Brazil, Albania, Iraq, Vietnam, Ghana, Liberia, Kenya, DRC, Burundi, Somalia
In particular, fellows are trained to provide initial evaluations for newly arriving refugees and become primary care physicians for said refugee families. They work with a strong multidisciplinary team and learn to partner with community organizations to provide much needed wrap-around care.
Fellows are encouraged to undergo training with PHR to learn to perform forensic evaluations for people seeking asylum. Once training is complete, mentorship and support is available to further develop fellow’s skills in working with asylees, their legal team and local academic and community partners.
Learn more about our refugee and asylum care.
Satu Salonen, MD and Olga Valdman, MD in Nicaragua
International Sites
Up to 7 months of the 2 year fellowship will be spent abroad working at our partner sites where fellows would function as junior faculty and engage in projects focused on capacity building, training, research and mentorship of younger trainees as well as collaborative work with colleagues on the ground. Below are descriptions of two of our sites where fellows have done the most work recently and examples of types of engagement:
Liberia - In Liberia we partner with a brand new Family Medicine residency set at the ELWA hospital outside of Monrovia. FHCW/UMass GH Fellows have been involved in the Liberia residency program as junior faculty providing teaching and supervision to local residents while themselves being supervised and supported by senior local faculty.
Learn more about our work in Liberia.
Dominican Republic - Our collaboration in the Dominican Republic is focused on work to improve the health of a migrant Haitian/Dominican population living in communities called bateyes. There is a long-standing partnership between a local mission hospital and UMass Chan Medical School. Recently a partnership was created between a local NGO as well. Previous fellow work has focused on a local Community Health Worker (CHW) program as well as further development of the UMass Chan and nursing student global health trips.