In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declared that all people have a right to medical care, yet more than seven decades later there are still millions around the world who don't have access to some of the most basic medical treatments.
- By JAKE MILLER
Ten years ago, the Harvard Medical School Department of Global Health and Social Medicine launched a new master's degree program, the Master of Medical Sciences in Global Health Delivery (MMSc-GHD), designed to help frontline caregivers, health care administrators, and policy leaders from around the globe research the root causes of health inequity and design and test solutions to deliver the promise of modern medicine to all those in need.
Since last spring, the department has been celebrating the 10th anniversary of the arrival of the program's first class of four students, in spring 2012, by hosting a series of events throughout the 2022-2023 academic year highlighting the accomplishments of the program's alumni.
"The delivery of medical care in settings of extreme privation is still a novel concept," said Joia Mukherjee, associate professor of global health and social medicine in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS.
"Until very recently, prevention-only was promoted as the only feasible option for the world's poor. It was unheard of to try to care for people with cancer or mental illness or other complex diseases in resource-limited settings," said Mukherjee, who has been director of the MMSc-GHD program since its inception. "Our students and alumni are using the tools of social medicine - history, political economy, anthropology - to understand and mitigate the social forces that underpin ill health. They are designing programs to provide equitable care."
Mukherjee explained that the study and practice of social medicine - upon which the global health and social medicine department was founded 150 years ago - is essential to achieving equity. Impoverished countries, communities, and people face many barriers to prevent, detect, and treat illness. Overcoming these challenges requires a multidisciplinary approach and a committed, collaborative relationship with the communities that providers are hoping to serve.
Mukherjee draws on her 23 years of experience as chief medical officer for Partners In Health (PIH), an international organization founded by the late Paul Farmer, which is focused on health care delivery to those in greatest need. PIH has repeatedly achieved things that prevailing wisdom had deemed impossible, such as delivering state-of-the-art care for patients with HIV in rural Haiti, or fighting multidrug-resistant tuberculosis in the urban sprawl of Lima, Peru.
Mukherjee and colleagues designed the MMSc-GHD program based on their experiences working with community partners in countries including Haiti, Liberia, Peru, and Russia to find ways to deliver care for diseases like HIV, drug-resistant tuberculosis, depression and other severe mental illnesses, as well as diseases that require surgical treatments.
Department faculty also have also drawn upon their experiences building deep connections with academic medical institutions like the University of Global Health Equity in Rwanda and University Hospital in Mirebalais, Haiti, and their efforts to partner in research and training collaborations.
These collaborations involve all aspects of care, covering infectious and noncommunicable diseases, diseases that require surgical care, and mental health needs across Europe, Asia, Oceania, Africa, and the Americas. Global health faculty emphasize the importance of using social science methods to document successes and publishing the results to create a library of evidence that illustrates how their methods worked.
Faculty teach MMSc-GHD students to use this same approach as they mentor students to develop their thesis projects. Through these projects, MMSc-GHD students contribute to scholarship in global health by developing new approaches to improve health care delivery and equity.
"That's the work that our students have been doing for the last 10 years." Mukherjee said.
