When University of Vermont medical student Stefan Wheat ’18 left for a global health elective in Harare, Zimbabwe last summer, he had no idea he would be testing out a new living arrangement intended to enhance his educational experience.
Upon his arrival, Wheat moved into a flat in the medical student dormitory at University of Zimbabwe College of Health Sciences with UVM College of Medicine classmate Richard Mendez ’18 and Ruth Musselman, M.D., a senior internal medicine resident at Norwalk Hospital, part of Western Connecticut Health Network (WCHN) – UVM’s partner in its Global Health Program. In the flat’s kitchen, the group cooked meals together and discussed daily events.
The setup’s strength was “the confidence you create in living with a group of people who are all experiencing this at the same time,” Wheat says. Alone in an apartment, he admits, he would have felt isolated and overwhelmed by the stresses of the intensive work, the extent of disease and lack of resources that U.S. medical students rarely see.
“Things can get really rough when you’re in this kind of scenario,” Wheat says. “The degree of pathology and the way it is being managed there, it can be difficult to stomach.”
Three WCHN attending physicians rotated through Zimbabwe for two weeks each during the students’ six-week stay. Together, the team joined the morning rounds of their Zimbabwean colleagues, with the U.S. physicians giving input on patient decisions and teaching techniques.
The experimental model, which is called “Peer Mentorship/Early Exposure,” proved such a success that Wheat and his team decided to submit a paper about it to the journal Medical Science Educator, which published the article online April 27, 2016. As “guinea pigs” for the new approach, they deemed it an optimal arrangement for the growing Global Health program to adopt.
“We’re trying to move towards a system where every team has this kind of model,” Wheat says.
He and his coauthors compare their model to the Homestay setup used in Uganda – one of four other UVM/WCHN Global Health elective host sites. In a Homestay, visiting students reside with the family of a faculty member in that country, sharing meals and interacting daily. This is difficult to arrange, however, as it depends on the ability and willingness of local doctors to open their homes to visitors and overcome language barriers, the authors write.
“The Homestay model, in a lot of ways, is the ideal,” Wheat explains, because it provides a depth of cultural understanding and the emotional support of the host family.
The Peer Mentorship/Early Exposure model also allows for plenty of cultural interaction between local students and their U.S peers in the dorm.
“We were living surrounded by Zimbabwe medical students,” Wheat says. “You get to know them, and they invite you to rugby games or play soccer with you.”
Wheat, a Washington native and the son of two physicians who worked extensively abroad, had spent time in Nepal, Nicaragua and Costa Rica with his family while growing up. More recently, he worked in the West Kalimantan area of the Indonesian island of Borneo with a nonprofit organization devoted to health and environmental issues. Once he began medical school at UVM, he planned to pursue his interest in global health, but didn’t know much about the program.
“I don’t think I really appreciated how unique this experience was,” he says.
For the Peer Mentorship/Early Exposure model, global health participants begin training and preparing in their first year of medical school. They travel to their host country during the summer before the start of their second year, and return to the country again during their fourth year.
Establishing a viable structure for global health students is crucial not only to their individual learning experience, but also for medical schools in general to handle a growing interest in global health.
“By striving to bridge the gap between interest and capacity, we invest in future leaders and help guide the next generation of citizens of the world: individuals who will become instruments of social change, capable of addressing the increasing healthcare disparities around the world,” state Wheat and his co-authors in the article.
This new model – which represents a major collaboration between UVM, WCHN, and the Global Health Program’s new partners at the University of Zimbabwe College of Health Sciences – is “the ideal that we hope to achieve moving forward at all of our global health sites, including Zimbabwe, Vietnam, Russia, the Dominican Republic, and Uganda,” says Wheat.