Letter from the President

From GHEC President Dr. David Zakus

HELLO TO ALL MEMBERS OF THE GLOBAL HEALTH COMMUNITY. It has taken me a few weeks to get back to things after the great conference(s) in San Francisco. Thanks so much to Tom Hall, Karen Lam and all those who worked so diligently to make the three days at the Miyako Radisson in Japantown such a great success and overall learning experience (and the subsequent conference the following day at UCSF). I was particularly pleased with the great emphasis on education and human resource development, which, after all, is at the heart of our organization.

I officially took on the role as your new president at the end of the conference during the Annual General Meeting. I am both honoured and happy to be taking over this responsibility from Andre-Jacques Neusy from New York University, who has done such an exemplary and effective job over the last two years. Thanks to you Andre-Jacques for setting the high standards for me to follow and for your fantastic contributions.

Looking ahead, there are as many challenges being presented to us, as there are great opportunities. During my acceptance speech at the Annual General Meeting I outlined how I see ‘global health’ as we enter into a new era: following on the tragedy of 9/11 which, however one looks at it, brought the growing world-wide inequalities to our continent in an expression of hatred and desperation; then SARS came along, not as much to the US, but to Canada in a very profound way, killing 44 in Toronto and affecting hundreds more…then dealing with BSE, West Nile Virus, and most recently the great Tsunami which hit SE Asia just as we were celebrating a few months ago. While the unbelievable waves did not touch any of our shores, it did affect millions in our midst—many through the direct loss of family, but in many other ways as well, making this disaster one with a truly global impact.

We are coming together more closely when it comes to world health. Whether it is HIV/AIDS sweeping through southern Africa and parts of Asia, the re-emergence of tuberculosis, the continuing fight against malaria, or the looming specter of a flu pandemic and the hugely growing impact of chronic diseases, we have many challenges to meet to keep our health safe. Many of these challenges relate to the training of younger men and women to take up these and the many other ever-present challenges on the global and national stages; for the local and the foreign are now coming together in a way and at a pace never seen before.

We have a special responsibility to take up these challenges of training, mentoring and education. We have a special and often intimate knowledge that many other health care professionals don’t have; we have traveled and worked abroad, and we work to help enable these types of experiences for our colleagues, residents and students. We must continue working to enable the development of further educational tools for this type of training. This can be done through GHEC.

One of my first official duties as President was to preside over the change of our organization’s name, from the International Health Medical Education Consortium (IHMEC) to the Global Health Education Consortium (GHEC). We made this shift in order to be more inclusive in our journey to create better world health. We recognize that our mandate is truly global, which without getting into semantics, brings the international into our own backyard, especially with our growing emphasis on multicultural health—a reflection of the changing ethnic mosaic of our nations. We recognize that major changes in world health are only going to come from a multidisciplinary effort, involving medicine for sure, but also our colleagues in nursing, public health, medical assisting, the basic sciences, social sciences, and any other which shares our quest to make a real difference in the world through health. We recognize that as health professionals we are charged and responsible to use what we know for the benefit of others.

I could chat on, but won’t for now, except to say that I will be regularly reaching GHEC members in the revitalized Newsletter, which should be out later this year. This, along with a host of other new and enhanced products and services, will be a feature of the next couple of years. We must keep up with new challenges, and work together with other like-minded health professionals. To achieve this, we must continually expand our membership, so that GHEC can not only meet its current goals, but also reach new heights through new energy, volunteered time and better financial performance.

We are an organization of volunteers, with a great Board of Directors, with one half-time employee (Karen Lam) to keep us on track and one super serious volunteer (Tom Hall) who dedicates much of his retirement time to us. But, we need more volunteer members, more energy, to keep us going in a direction that will be satisfying and honourable.

I will continue from time to time remind our members of the many areas where one can volunteer time, experience and expertise. I hope that as a member of GHEC and of the global health community you will find the areas that best reflect your background and goals and contribute to our efforts to promote global health education in the Americas and abroad.

You may have noticed the odd spelling to a few words, this reflecting my Canadian identity. It will also be my and the University of Toronto’s honour and pleasure to welcome you next year to Toronto for the next GHEC Annual Conference. Many suggestions have been given for the themes and a preliminary date was announced at the San Francisco conference for May, 2006. But, as was also announced, this was just a suggested date, and we will be setting the exact date in the next month.

I look forward to contributing to the growth and effectiveness of GHEC over the next two years. Thank you for placing your confidence in me. I will work to ensure that GHEC continues to be an organization we are proud of and one that continually makes an ever-greater contribution to world health…through our particular mission of Education.

Bye for now…Sincerely,

David Zakus

Director, Centre for International Health

Associate Professor, Department of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation

Associate Professor, Department of Public Health Sciences

Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto

May 24, 2005