Review common but often-unexpected cultural issues that arise during consults across wide religious, ethnic, geographic, language, and socio-economic gulfs. Learn skills to communicate more effectively with patients, utilize translators, and reduce medical error related to miscommunication. Participants should gain confidence when approaching consults in unfamiliar cultural settings and using cultural competency skills to improve clinical outcomes.

A summary of fundamental and specific pre-mission, intra-mission, and post-mission deployment considerations for ensuring successful and safe medical aid work. This leadership review includes mission due diligence, logistics, team dynamics and clinic organization, important roles, and patient flows in mobile clinic work. Participants should develop improved mission planning and administration skills and be better prepared for executive-level mission decisions and leadership.

Explore the complex medico-legal considerations surrounding mission work in developing regions. Learn how to avoid placing you or your team in legal trouble while far from home, how to license and ensure the security of your team, and how to make best-practice decisions in resource limited settings. Also review the ethical considerations for mission work and handling medical errors. Participants should develop an appropriate ethical framework to guide their behavior during medical aid work, reduce their liability on missions, ensure better informed consent, and work more smoothly with local services.

Learn how to assemble the most appropriate mobile pharmacy for your mission needs, safely get it all through customs, and use it effectively during your deployment. Participants learn how to choose the best medications for different setting needs and assemble the most powerful and portable diagnostic tool kit their mission resources allow. Participants develop skills to increase patient compliance and decrease prescribing errors.

Review the fundamental ways that any mission’s scope of service can be improved. Learn to do more with less: a critical skill for functioning in resource-limited environments. Includes planning skills to maximize the impact of medical aid work. Participants learn to add more value to medical aid deployments in the planning stages and during the mission.

For surgeon and non-surgeons, an overview of fundamental surgical considerations in medical aid work, with an emphasis on strategies for remote field settings. Participation in dedicated surgical specialty missions is discussed, as well as surgical procedures in the field, review of anesthesia and sedation techniques in remote settings, developing the most appropriate surgical tool kit for your mission needs, different wound closure strategies, review of common procedure techniques in the field, and the ethical considerations for surgical interventions in mission settings. Participants should gain increased contextual understanding of the requirements for effective and safe surgical work in medical aid, and increased confidence and competence at planning for surgical mission work and management of specific surgical presentations.