WS 24 - Developing Global Health in Academic Institutions and Medical Centers

Academic medical centers are primarily tasked with ensuring that regional and national healthcare systems function, both now and in the future, by providing education, research and patient care. At the same time, universities are expected to educate autonomous, open and responsible individuals. As the world is becoming ever more globalized, terms like global citizenship, global impact and global health increasingly find their way into the mission statements and internationalization strategies of universities, including academic medicine. However, operationalizing global health in an institution comes with a number of challenges and questions.

The session analyzes how academic medical centers around the world deal with global health: What are their motivations to become involved? What role do universities play in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals? Given that global health is highly interdisciplinary, how can universities harness the diversity of academic discipline and subject cultures for maximizing their impact? How do they organize and institutionalize global health and how do they finance their global health work? What are the barriers? What do future practitioners expect from global health education and training? How can teaching, research and patient care be effectively linked in the context of global health? What role do North-South or South-South partnerships play, and in what way do they need to be designed in order to ensure that both partners benefit? What opportunities are there to team up with non-university partners in global health? And last but not least, are current approaches suitable to reach their aims?