Short Term Surgical Missions Guatemala Intervention

As a part of my senior capstone for Public Health, I had the opportunity to work alongside 3 classmates to propose an intervention for the following Public Health issue in Guatemala. Additionally we applied and were accepted to present at the annual Spring Annual Research Conference (SpARC). The lack of regulation for short-term surgical trips in Guatemala raises ethical concerns, structural violence, and harmful treatment practices. These factors ultimately lead to a decrease in the quality of care, weaken the healthcare system, and result in adverse healthcare outcomes.
Credit: “SpARC Conference” by Sonia Patel licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Our intervention proposal examines the current benefits/ harms of short-term surgical mission trip and provides a public-health-based intervention to strengthen short-term surgical mission trips by developing safe, sustainable, and regulated surgical practices in Guatemala. Our intervention consists of 4 main components that approach the problem at 4 different levels of the health system in Guatemala. The intervention will address the problem starting at the government level, Non-Profit level, health professional level, and the patient level. Our intervention will provide training sessions with government employees, create online training for visiting surgeons, develop a communication platform between NGOs/Organizations located in Guatemala, and conduct patient advocacy workshops.  This research hopes to enable a different way of practice of short-term surgical trips with more ethical accountability, cultural awareness, and safer medical practic.

Please find the full intervention description below.

PH375_Short-Term-Surgical-Missions-in-GuatemalaDownload

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