[Sent – 24 March 2019 to the 170+ surgeons et al of our Surgical Ethics (Education) Consortium]
Greetings from St. Louis and WashU. I depart Tuesday for Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza) to join my close friend and physician colleague David McRay, MD, for the last ten days of this year’s global health elective in Palestine – the tenth year (beginning in 2009) we have conducted this month-long educational project which now more than sixty learners – mostly 4th-year medical students with a few upper-level residents from medical schools across the US -- have completed. In addition to shepherding the educational experience for the participants, Dr. McRay serves as a clinical instructor for Palestinian primary care physicians, obstetricians, and palliative care teams and I serve as an ethics education/training instructor for medical and surgical staffs at Palestinian teaching hospitals.
So for my ‘Surgical Ethics Education Resources -- #14’ communication, I am sharing what I consider to be my primary contribution to the healthcare professionals in Palestine re medical and surgical ethics – i.e., the opportunity for them to translate into Arabic a set of seven basic tools for navigating ethical conflicts in patient care. For the first several years, we very cautiously and attentively sought to understand the challenges they face and the resources available to them. Their patience eventually resulted in sufficient insight to offer for their consideration the set of tools I had developed for use with our WashU 3rd-year surgery clerkship students and with the ethics consult services I chair for two community hospitals here in St. Louis. Three years ago, we took the pivotal step – i.e., facilitating an ongoing series of workshops bringing together attendings and residents from several teaching hospitals in Palestine for them to translate the set of tools into Arabic (see below). By doing so, they have taken ownership of the tools . . . they have made the set of tools their own.
I know many of you are involved in global health surgical education. I offer this example as a way to encourage your efforts to be very rigorous in respecting the local caregivers’ skills/potential, in contextualizing what you deliver to them, and in trusting their leadership. I welcome your feedback and am happy to respond to any questions you may have about our Palestine global health elective.
Doug
PS: In case you are wondering, I am not fluent in Arabic. The translations are completely their own.
