Harvard Catalyst Profiles

The EqualHealth Social Medicine Course, Beyond the Biological Basis of Disease, brings together health profession students from Haiti, North America, and around the world to share in an immersive three-week intellectual and cultural exchange focused on the principles of Social Medicine. The course is designed for health profession students of all levels (including those studying medicine, nursing, midwifery, and public health), and links global health with social medicine teaching (taught in French). The course pedagogy includes field visits, classroom-based presentations and discussions, group reflections, student presentations, films, and bedside teaching. These approaches create an interactive learning environment where students participate as both learners and teachers. The goal is to advance the cohort’s understanding of interactions between the biology of disease and the social, cultural, economic, political, and historical factors that influence illness presentation and social experience. The course emphasizes building partnerships and encourages students to reflect upon their own experiences with power, privilege, race, class, gender, and sexual orientation as central to effective partnership building in global health. In the spirit of praxis, a model of education that combines critical reflection with action, students are empowered to discern their role in global health and social medicine through facilitated, in-depth conversations with core faculty and student colleagues. We are looking for students to serve as teaching assistants for the course and to support the annual evaluation of the course which could result in publication. We are also looking for students with a strong and particular interest in medical education to develop a longitudinal educational outcomes study evaluation the annual course over time (the course began in July 2013 and has been held for three weeks every July ever since).