Global Health Training Collaborations: Lessons Learned and Best Practices

Interest in global health training experiences among trainees from higher income countries has grown. The Working Group on Ethics Guidelines for Global Health Training (WEIGHT) clarified best practices in 2010 based on expert consensus. These guidelines address both balancing priorities in international partnerships and local sustainability concerns related to short-term experiences. However, the guidelines can be difficult to implement in actual practice. Because our organization predated the availability of these consensus guidelines, we reviewed our current set of practices for hosting service-learning programs at our rural Ugandan clinic for adherence to the WEIGHT guidelines. The discrete activities and standardized processes developed over 10 years of hosting experiences were grouped into broader hosting categories, with consensus among the hosting and sending volunteer coordinators of our non-governmental organization partnership. These practices were then mapped to the WEIGHT guidelines. We found our implementation strategies map these guidelines into a clear checklist of actions that can be used by coordinators involved in global health training programs. We include some of the historical reasons that led to our current processes, which may help other partnerships identify similar practice gaps. We anticipate that this action-oriented checklist with historical context will help accomplish the difficult implementation of best practices in global health training collaborations.