Global Impact Corps: Global Health Training and Hands-On Service
What do Global Impact Fellows do?
- Global Impact Fellows are engaged as future leaders in global health, are locally led and managed by Unite For Sight's partner eye clinics, and assist local eye clinics to provide comprehensive year-round care that addresses the root causes of patient barriers to care.
- Efficiency: With the assistance of Unite For Sight Global Impact Fellows, the local eye doctors are able to significantly increase their efficiency and examine and diagnose 100-300 patients in a single day. While the local eye doctors focus on the examinations and diagnoses, the Unite For Sight Global Impact Fellows assist in all other aspects of the needed work: patient intake, patient histories, visual acuity screenings, and distribution of medication and eyeglasses prescribed by the local eye doctors. Unite For Sight's visiting optometrist and ophthalmologist volunteers work closely with the local eye doctors to assist with providing eye care in the community, and visiting ophthalmologists work with the local ophthalmologists to provide surgery as well as skills transfer.
- Education: Global Impact Fellows help to educate communities about healthcare access, basic eye disease prevention measures, and treatment options. For example, after the eye doctors educate patients about how and when to use eye medication, Unite For Sight Global Impact Fellows re-emphasize the important medication management information to the patients.
- Measuring Results: Global Impact Fellows assist the local eye clinics with recording, compiling, and submitting patient outcome data to Unite For Sight.
- Financial: Fundraising is an important component of volunteering. Unite For Sight's funding enables the local eye clinics to reach their greatest potential and focus on providing eye care for patients living in extreme poverty who are unable to pay. Unite For Sight subsidizes medical costs, fully funds patient surgeries, provides grants to local eye clinics to hire local outreach staff, and provides medical equipment and supplies. Global Impact Fellows are able to generate important donations so that Unite For Sight's programs have an even greater impact.
- Research Studies: Global Impact Fellows are encouraged to develop research studies that contribute to knowledge about global health needs and solutions. Participation in this Global Impact Lab program is optional.
What is Global Impact Training?
Unite For Sight supports eye clinics worldwide by investing human and financial resources in their social ventures to eliminate patient barriers to eye care. Our research, experience, and evaluation has enabled us to develop a highly successful pre-service training and orientation process that ensures that Global Impact Fellows are fully prepared to contribute to the success of the Unite For Sight programs. Global Impact Training is the foundation for the Global Impact Fellow's immersive global health experience.
Why is Global Impact Training important?
Comprehensive training is essential for volunteers. Volunteers who are not both practically and psychologically competent to work abroad can be a burden to a global health organization and its local partners. On the other hand, well-prepared volunteers can make an immediate, vitally important, high-impact difference. Unite For Sight educates its fellows on local culture, ethics, and professionalism. Without such preparation, volunteers can fail to relate well to local patients and medical professionals, which can undermine the relationship between patients and local medical providers. Global Impact Fellows must be competent to support and assist eye clinic staff by providing basic visual acuity screenings, providing education, distributing the medication and eyeglasses prescribed by the local eye doctors, and assisting in other tasks. Incompetent volunteers can do more harm than good by propogating false information, or by interfering with proper medical care.
Global Impact Training includes online course material in global health, social entrepreneurship, issues in medication management, community eye health, and other related topics. Upon arriving abroad, Global Impact Fellows have an immersive global health experience in which they assist with village outreach programs that are led and managed by local healthcare professionals. While assisting and supporting the local ophthalmologists, optometrists, and ophthalmic nurses, Global Impact Fellows see first-hand the global health concepts that they studied in Global Impact Training. Some of these important topics include:
- What are the complexities and realities of global health that must be understood by anyone participating in a healthcare delivery program in a resource-poor setting?
- What barriers to care affect the patients that you meet, and how can patient education help to eliminate those barriers?
- Why will you encounter patients who will refuse free cataract surgery? What are their barriers to care?
- Why must healthcare be delivered by local healthcare professionals?
- Why are visiting non-eye care professionals prohibited from attempting to diagnose patients?
- Why is follow-up care and continuity of care a must?
- What protocol should be used when working with a translator?
- Why does Unite For Sight receive and analyze all preoperative and postoperative visual acuity data for surgical patient metrics?
- What is your role as a volunteer, and how does Unite For Sight work?
- What are guidelines for observing and assisting doctors in the field and at the clinic?
- What are the traits of a successful international volunteer?
- What is the difference between social entrepreneurship and charity, and why does Unite For Sight support local entrepreneurial talent in developing countries?
Through this online training, you will gain an understanding about strategies in global health and the complexities and realities of healthcare delivery. After completing the online course work and participating in the immersive global health experience abroad, you will receive a Certificate in Global Health & Program Delivery. We encourage you to thereafter apply your global health delivery knowledge and skills to become a leader in global health, and we hope that you will also remain closely involved with Unite For Sight through our opportunities for alumni.
International Experience: Immersive Global Health Training
- Unite For Sight's Global Impact Corps provides Fellows with an immersive, structured global health training experience while they work with local eye doctors to eliminate patient barriers to care.
- Global health is best learned from local social entrepreneurs and local clinicians who are directly involved in eliminating health and education disparities.
- While Participating in the Global Impact Corps, Fellows can expect to:
- Receive a Certificate in Global Health & Program Delivery.
- Gain a hands-on understanding about the complexities and realities of global health, about best practices, and become aware that good intentions are not enough.
- Work with partner eye clinics' talented ophthalmologists who are social entrepreneurs addressing complex global health issues.
- Be immersed in the field of social entrepreneurship and understand the opportunities and challenges facing social entrepreneurs and clinicians in developing countries.
- Be engaged in cutting-edge global health and community eye care programs that are reducing patient barriers to care.
- Develop strong skills in cultural competency, ethics, professionalism, interpersonal communication in the health setting, and community eye health.
Alumni Global Impact Fellows Reflect On Global Impact Training:
- "I think future Global Impact Fellows should seriously study the training modules so that they have a firm understanding of the international details before they leave. There is a wealth of information in those modules, and if taken seriously they provide the volunteer with all of the intellectual knowledge necessary to prepare. That knowledge is the foundation for the experience a volunteer will have on site."
- "Give yourself enough time to go through the training. It's good stuff that shouldn't be rushed at all."
- "There is much that one needs to be prepared for before one can truly understand and appreciate the experience."
- "Thinking critically about sustainable, accountable, effective aid intervention and development strategies was part of my the intensive pre-departure preparation that UFS requires of all its volunteers. It was essentially a crash-course in global health, social entrepreneurship, and ethical, impactful health-related aid work. I feel that it was being armed with this background, along with my experience abroad, that enabled me to embark on my own social entrepreneurship ventures while in Ghana. I could not have begun trying to construct social entrepreneurial ventures without the foundation provided by UFS’s global health conference, the extensive pre-departure volunteer training and the actual on-the-ground experience I gained while abroad on the UFS program."
- "The level of training provided for the volunteers is extensive and thorough, instilling the confidence necessary to travel to a foreign country to provide assistance. I was most impressed by the intense effort to establish and operate an NGO that was sustainable and completely focused on best practices. Prior to the UFS training, I was not fully aware of the amount of damage that poorly run programs could cause, even when aiming to accomplish noble goals. The Global Impact Training articles and discussion, such as Dufflebag Medicine, allowed me to reflect upon the positive and negative practices in volunteering and their impacts on the community and the future effectiveness of other programs. Admittedly, these points were constantly in the back of my mind as I executed my duties in Ghana."