Q&A: What can future physicians learn from practicing abroad?

After my residency, I did a fellowship in medical education, and initially was involved in medical student education,  developing and running a new clerkship in emergency medicine for medical students.  Then, I was the director of the emergency medicine residency for six years before making a career change to do more global health work. 

Since I switched, my focus has been global health education and working in emergency medicine to start a robust global health program involving residents and medical students. When this position was advertised, it seemed like a really good way for me to use my skills beyond my own department and be involved in global medical education for all trainees. 

Q. What are your main goals for this new position?

A. I support graduate medical education and the center’s programs in bringing our learners to various existing rotation sites and developing new sites with the goal of maintaining bilateral partnerships. We want reciprocal, equitable relationships. We’re hoping to develop sites where we have a consistent presence, where residents and students go back to the same sites year after year, where we have a longitudinal relationship and a bilateral exchange.

Q. What will the first few months look like?

A. A lot of programs already exist, as many faculty here have developed excellent programs with these types of relationships. Some of the work will just be continuing to support those programs in several countries, such as Tanzania, Uganda, India and South Africa. We recently joined the AMPATH (Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare) Consortium, a network of academic health centers around the world, and now work in Kenya and Nepal. There are also programs in Costa Rica, Ghana, and Ecuador. 

Dr. Sudhir has called Charlottesville home for 25 years, after moving here for medical school. (Photo by Matt Riley, University Communications)

We’ll be helping departments that are looking to develop (Center for Global Health Equity) collaborations and streamline the process for medical students and residents to apply to various rotations and to help them make the choice about where they want to go. We will be helping then prepare for travel in various ways, and I hope that at some point we can also focus on language acquisition and skills. 

Q. What do you want students to gain from these international opportunities?

A. In many situations, they’re learning to practice medicine in more resource-constrained settings than what they’re exposed to here at UVA, which helps develop their clinical judgment and practical skills. 

For example, our residents who go to Kenya learn to put in IVs much better than they’re used to because the physicians have to do them all there, so they get more practice. They’re also exposed to what medical problems people might present with in a very different setting in a health care system with a different infrastructure, which teaches adaptability. 

It also allows for closer relationships between faculty, residents and students, because we’re traveling to an unfamiliar place and spending a lot more time together than we typically would here at UVA. So, it’s led to some really great conversations about what it means to be a physician that might be harder to have in a work setting at UVA. They develop an awareness of being a health care provider in a global context, our role in the global community, and our interconnectedness as humans.  I think there are many, many ways that these experiences are valuable, and it leads the trainees to bring those skills back to UVA and our own communities here.