Economic Development

Ethical Medicine in Short Term Trips

Suturing

This session will look at the reality of suffering in this world and how to reorient our hearts and minds to face it well.

Clear communication is essential in any effective healthcare environment. Working in another language adds a whole new layer of complexity to the communication process. Learning another language can seem like a daunting task, especially if you had a negative past experience with a foreign language, or it can be viewed as an exciting adventure. This session will focus on practical tips that engage your internal motivations leading to appropriate language proficiency for kingdom impact.

“Service is the sign of true love. Those who love know how to serve others. We learn this especially in the family, where we become servants out of love for one another. In the heart of the family, no one is rejected; all have the same value.” – Pope Francis

The money spent for missionary work to cover their costs of a mission trip to fly to Central America to repaint an orphanage would have been enough money to hire two local painters and two full time teachers and purchase new uniforms for every student in the school. When White Saviorism becomes more important than the people, what are we left with?

On the flip side, there is a need, and we can all help. What can we do to make sure we are working responsibly and sustainably?

Step 1: Knowing the context and identifying the key needs.

• Ensure the identified needs and assets of the community, as determined by a wide range of community members, are upheld and prioritized within the program aims and objectives.
• A host partner that defines the program, including the needs to be addressed and the teaching of volunteers
• Ongoing leadership of programs by nationals
• Driven by demand and built with synergistic partnerships

Step 2: Defining your values and principles

• Respect for governance and legal and ethical standards
• Make local community members partners in the relationship and rely on local knowledge in all stages of developing, implementing, and evaluating the program/experience
• Reciprocity: promoting an environment in which the human rights, dignity, values, customs, and spiritual beliefs of the individual, family, and community are respected.

Step 3: Enabling Sustainability

• Provide fair compensation for all direct and indirect costs associated with the program and its projects, such as transportation, housing, food, clean water, translators, and other staff, supplies, electricity, and fuel
• Symmetry of priorities and resources between visiting volunteers and host community members assisting them

Step 4: Selecting the most suitable candidates

• References must be obtained and candidates must be evaluated in stressful, complex, and culturally diverse settings
• Candidates must value diversity of opinion, beliefs, culture, and perspectives
• Appropriate screening for qualifications, experience, and background checks
• Scenario based interview questions

Step 5: Preparing them to serve

• Ensure that faculty, staff, or chaperones working with the programs are properly trained in working with host communities
• Ensure that the chaperones understand the social, economic, and cultural contexts of the project at hand and are prepared to help students navigate and reflect on the cultural, economic, social, and physical differences they encounter
• Orientation at every stage of the process
• Extensive orientation pre-deployment and in country

Step 6: Evaluating and learning

• Develop an appropriate mechanism for evaluating outcomes and local impact
• Regularly evaluate and assess all partners to ensure that goals and responsibilities are being met
• Regular program evaluation for impact
• Monthly report for facility/medical volunteers
• End of service report with recommendations for program development
• Emphasis on extensive storytelling from those in the field/volunteers
• Training attendance sheet
• Volunteer satisfaction survey

Let’s continue to work together to leave a legacy to God’s global family.

About Marcia Grand Ortega: 

Marcia Grand Ortega has over 10 years of international experience working in project management, communications, and evaluation in the private, academic and not-for-profit sectors. Before joining CMMB HQ, she volunteered with their Peru programs. During that time in 2015, she had the opportunity to meet with beneficiary families both in Trujillo and Huancayo and work with the incredible community health workers, volunteers, and staff involved in providing healthcare services that truly changed lives. It was this experience that brought Marcia to New York in 2016, where she took on the role of manager for the international volunteer program. In the last 2 years, Marcia has relaunched the medical mission program for health professionals available to serve only for a short-term, and has coordinated medical teams visiting Haiti and Zambia, while recruiting and deploying another 30 clinical volunteers to the field for long term service.

Living "incarnationally" (among a culture different from your own), especially among marginalized people (the poor, immigrants, etc.) is a proven way to face your own cultural biases, muster courage, learn greater dependence on the Holy Spirit, and develop meaningful relationships with people very different from yourself. Besides being good for your soul, it's ideal preparation for international healthcare missions. 

This session will look at the reality of suffering in this world and how to reorient our hearts and minds to face it well.

About 25 years ago, while sharing an early morning cup of coffee with my dear friend and practice partner, family physician John Hartman, MD, he asked, “Walt, how come we don’t bring our faith to work with us more often?” It was a question the Lord used to convict me of the fact that although my personal relationship with God was the primary and most important relationship in my life, more often than not I tended to leave Him at the door when entering the hospital or medical office. The question was the catalyst for this talk: Spiritual Interventions in Patient Care.

Research findings, a desire to provide high-quality care, and simple common sense, all underscore the need to integrate spirituality into patient care. It is highly ethical for healthcare professionals and healthcare systems to assess their patients’ spiritual health and needs and to provide indicated and desired spiritual interventions. Clinicians and health care systems should not deprive their patients of the spiritual support and comfort on which their hope, health, wellbeing, and longevity may hinge.

Before you get started, I must share this caution from Stephen Post, PhD: “Professional problems can occur when well-meaning healthcare professionals ‘faith-push’ a patient opposed to discussing religion.” However, on the other side of the coin, “rather than ignoring faith completely with all patients, most of whom want to discuss it, we can explore which of our patients are interested and who are not.” Simply put, a spiritual assessment can help us do this with each patient we see. We can potentially gain the following from a spiritual assessment:

• The patient’s religious background,
• The role that religious or spiritual beliefs or practices play in coping with illness (or causing distress),
• Beliefs that may influence or conflict with decisions about medical care, 
• The patient’s level of participation in a spiritual community and whether the community is supportive, and ‹
• Any spiritual needs that might be present.

Several fairly-easy-to-use mnemonics have been designed to help health professionals, such as the “GOD” spiritual assessment I developed for CMDA’s Saline Solution:

G = God: − May I ask your faith background? Do you have a spiritual or faith preference? Is God, spirituality, religion or spiritual faith important to you now, or has it been in the past?

O = Others: − Do you now meet with others in religious or spiritual community, or have you in the past? If so, how often? How do you integrate with your faith community?

D = Do: − What can I do to assist you in incorporating your spiritual or religious faith into your medical care? Or, is there anything I can do to encourage your faith? May I pray with or for you?

However, this and other spiritual assessment tools fail to inquire about a critical item involving spiritual health: any religious struggles the patient may be having. A robust literature shows religious struggles can predict mortality, as there is an inverse association between faith and morbidity and mortality of various types.

Sir William Osler, one of the founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital and frequently described as the “Father of Modern Medicine,” wrote, “Nothing in life is more wonderful than faith…the one great moving force which we can neither weigh in the balance nor test in the crucibIe - mysterious, indefinable, known only by its effects, faith pours out an unfailing stream of energy while abating neither jot nor tittle of its potence.” You can experience that driving force of faith when you apply these principles of spiritual assessment in your practice of healthcare, thereby allowing you to minister to your patients in ways you never imagined possible, while also increasing personal and professional satisfaction. One doctor recently shared with me, “Ministering in my practice has allowed God to bear fruit in and through me in new and wonderful ways. I can’t wait to see what He’s going to do in and through me each day. My practice and I have been transformed.”

This session will address five common misconceptions about missions that are based on assumptions and conspire to prevent people from exploring their own fit in mission.

Do you participate in short-term medical relief trips? In this session, relief organizations and volunteers (both medical and non-medical) will be challenged to think deeply about the practices they employ in the field and the impact they make on foreign patients/communities. We have high standards for health care in the United States, but there currently exists no standardized way of assessing the methods implemented and services offered by short-term medical missions in the field. This session hopes to build off of participants' brainstorming and also introduce participants to a novel self-assessment framework to assess the efficacy, sustainability, and long-term impact of your organization(s).

Short term missions can leave an impact on receiving communities if done well in partnership with hosting churches and ministries.

Through sharing personal experience and case studies, current demographics, trends, treatment and challenges of HIV care will be discussed

Spotlight on fifteen of the world's most un-evangelized people groups.

Sending organizations spend tens of millions of dollars each year sending clinicians and support staff overseas. They invest very little in comparison on the leaders who are essential to preventing their burnout. Competent and compassionate administrative leaders are not only essential for developing and sustaining resilient healthcare and ministry teams; they also shepherd the systems that optimize human, technological and financial resources and prevent waste of resources and harm to patients. Despite its necessity, healthcare leadership and management training often scarce in many of the world’s most marginalized places. In this presentation, Anderson makes a case for the necessity of building leadership capacity and introduces practical tools that help address this training gap while building vibrant, sustainable mission teams.

Objective of the session is to inform other Medical Missionaries, other doctors and other Missionaries about Evangelism through caring for people living with HIV and AIDS in Zimbabwe.

Sourcing Safe Medicines for Missions

Many times in the missions world, we follow culture by implementing solutions borrowed from others in our same field. But what if we created in such a way that changed our industry? With more than 3.5 billion people living without access to the good news of Jesus, we need to start changing the way we look at solving our challenges. At this session, you will learn a process and tools to bring your God-given creativity to the way that you approach the challenges you face at home, work, or on the missions field.

God's Kingdom is one of paradox. He is famous for His heart for the poor and for His heart for the nations. However, most don't realize how intimately these two passions of His are intertwined. This has massive and unexpected implications for any disciple of Jesus. Paradoxically, global poverty will never end until every nation is reached with the Gospel.

How can urban health care missions be done in urban settings, especially in government owned facilities? This breakout session seeks to address this questions. Ministry can be done in and through government hospitals and institutions by connecting with healthcare personnel, sharing the gospel and discipling them and bringing them into healthy churches. This breakout session will give some insights and specifics into how to do this.