Background

For institutions offering global health programs, the safety of trainees during clinical rotations at international sites is paramount. Current guidelines for global health electives recommend pre-departure training and safety-net resources, yet their advice on managing unanticipated problems is limited.

Objective

This report illustrates critical safety considerations requiring additional guidance for programs and students and highlights approaches that may improve trainee safety while abroad.

Methods

We present a series of five cases adapted from the experiences of students traveling to and from the Yale School of Medicine between the years of 2011-2021. These cases include instances of personal injury, mental health challenges following trauma, sexual harassment, political instability, and natural disaster. For each case, we recommend ways in which programs and their participants may approach the challenges and we highlight issues requiring additional analysis.

Findings

We categorized the types of trainee safety issues into three groups: personal health emergencies, individual-level stressors, and large-scale crises.

Conclusion

Ultimately, we recommend that rather than solely emphasizing a universal policy, programs and trainees should also be educated on the tools and resources available for addressing unexpected emergencies.

Global health education (GHE) continues to be a growing initiative in many medical schools across the world. This focus is no longer limited to participants from high-income countries and has expanded to institutions and students from low- and middle-income settings. With this shift has come a need to develop meaningful curricula through engagement between educators and learners who represent the sending institutions and the diverse settings in which GHE takes place. The Bellagio Global Health Education Initiative (BGHEI) was founded to create a space for such debate and discussion and to generate guidelines towards a universal curriculum for global health. In this article, we describe the development and process of our work and outline six overarching principles that ought to be considered when adopting an inclusive approach to GHE curriculum development.