Short-Term Volunteers: By Ian Wong (SDS)

Volunteer for two weeks in Africa on a medical team giving out malaria medication and mosquito nets! This is a common phrase heard and promoted to many eager students waiting to get their feet wet in volunteering in the international community. My personal opinion on short-term medical volunteers? Frankly I don’t quite agree with the idea. Not that I have anything against volunteering in a medical setting, that is only permitted in countries with loosely enforced rules and standards, assisting the surgeon in neurosurgery, delivering babies as a high school student, or paying $2000 in program fees for 2 weeks to volunteer. It’s not even about doing it to improve your resume so that you can get into medical school.

The overlying reason that unites all medical volunteers is that those that choose to go have a genuine interest in bettering the health of those that are less well off. Right? (Unless you are doing it to improve your resume) Which is totally fine, and we should tip our hats off to you for donating your time and money to do all that. The one problem that I have with this is the lack of research that short-term medical volunteers (or any foreign organization for that matter…yes the United Nations included) sometimes put in before setting off to save the world. Mainly this is research about why this problem is happening (say for example, high incidence of malaria in Africa), what are the underlying social factors behind it and evaluate what has been done before. THEN, we should think about what we can do to help. In particular, I feel the underlying social factors are extremely important, as these are the real complex problems that are causing these “presenting” problems, such as malaria. As a result many of these projects are unsuccessful and patients keep coming back for more treatment.

Yes I agree, the pressing problem is a medical one. The first thing we want to do is to relieve the patient of malaria. But the real underlying causes are rooted in deep social issues, such as poverty, inequity, gender inequality, lack of education and corruption. To cement my point, we just need to take a look back in history. Infant mortality remained constant at 150 to 1,000 live births through 19th Century Britain, which is no different than any poor country today. When midwives became more regulated with the introduction of a legislation and the enactment of the early national insurance act, rates fell rapidly in the 20th Century. By 1930, the infant mortality rate was down to 60 deaths. This was before antibiotics, vaccines, and any advances in modern medicine.

Part of the reason why public health gets so little attention in the media and even in project funding is that it has an image problem. I mean… what is more exciting, neurosurgery or building a well for clean water? Same can be said about latest cancer treatments and smoking prevention programs.

As a result I think we should all be responsible to educate ourselves and become more aware of the underlying causes to these pressing problems before we go overseas. My intent for this blog was purely for fun (well I guess it is part of our course…), but I really want to bring to light the importance of having a public health focus when taking your projects abroad. The problem might be medical but there are many other issues that need to be solved in order to resolve the problem. Intervention programs that are purely medical in nature fail to make any differences, and are a huge waste of time and energy, as the disease will keep coming back. This is the basis for short-term medical work, and while it would be interesting to give sight to someone by removing their cataracts, or cure them of malaria, the best help that you can give them is from educating yourself first.