Overview: Health and medical sector

When we think about international work in health and medicine, we often envision field workers delivering primary care in conflict or disaster zones, or perhaps running vaccination campaigns in remote, underserved areas of the global south. But emergency humanitarian aid is just one of many areas in which health and medical professionals can play an important role abroad.

Worldwide inequalities in the quality and availability of healthcare mean that in many parts of the world, the need for medical and health professionals is enormous. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), sub-Saharan Africa is home to 11 per cent of the world’s population, has 25 per cent of the world’s burden of disease but only 3 per cent of the global health workforce. It’s estimated that to address current global health needs, an additional four million health workers are required.

Humanitarian aid and disaster relief falls within the much larger field of global public health. In its broadest terms, work in global health aims to address health issues that affect whole populations, transcend national boundaries, are affected by conditions and circumstances in multiple countries and are most effectively tackled through coordinated international cooperation.

Professionals who seek out overseas assignments in global public health have many different motivations: a sense of moral responsibility—sometimes related to their religious beliefs; for a love of travel and the adventure of living in unfamiliar and challenging environment; from a desire to return to one’s homeland and give back, or for professional development opportunities that can arise.

Dr. Videsh Kapoor, a family physician and Director of Global Health in the Department of Family Practice at UBC points out that, “Papers and studies have shown that when a physician works with a low resource or underserved community, wherever that may be, their skills as a physician improve because they become far more efficient at utilizing resources, they are more capable of working in rural locations, and they’re much more aware of social context and determinants.”