Both health professionals and pre-med, health and medical students are invited to participate in the Tanzania GSC International Health (IH) Program. The IH Program requires a nine-week minimum program length and can be extended to three months or more. This GSC program consists of two segments. The first segment of approximately four weeks is comprised of a week-long orientation and Training of Trainers (TOT) program followed by participation in workshops training community members, teachers and students in HIV/AIDS prevention and nutrition. The second segment includes a community service health project, and shadowing health professionals in local health care facilities.
During the community training part of your IH GSC program, you will be a key member of a team
including local Tanzanian counterparts, counselors and a Person Living with AIDS who together will encourage trainees to receive counseling and testing as well as adopt safe life style habits. Community training activities during the first June IH Program include participating in the HIV/AIDS prevention and life skills day camp provided to students and teachers at Arusha secondary schools. The second segment of the program includes shadowing opportunities during part of the week and community service health projects. Shadowing placements are available in several hospitals and clinics in the Arusha area as well as in hospitals further a field. International Health Programs are offered year-round and participants with medical knowledge can offer special skills to the HIV/AIDS program. Since Tanzania requires licensing in order for foreign doctors or nurses to practice medicine and the licensing procedure is complex and very time consuming, it is impractical for GSC to provide doctors and nurses strictly clinical placements. Even so, through the International Health Program, you will be able to engage in enriching service while learning about international health through shadowing and working with other health organizations.
The community service health projects depend on the needs of the community at the time of your placement and include providing further HIV/AIDS trainings, working with peer educators at local secondary schools, assisting HIV positive households with nutrition and food production, working with local orphanages or training hospital staff on basic computer skills or the use of telemedicine software as part of a newly launched telemedicine project.
In collaboration with one of our local partners GSC has initiated a new project to provide assistance to outlying rural Tanzanian hospitals in the development of an on-line telemedicine service. This service is a web-based telemedicine system for these hospitals to communicate with hospitals in the U.S., Europe and other developed countries These IH participants will help address the need to tutor hospital staff in basic computer skills or the use of the specialized telemedicine software, depending on the need of individual hospitals. The software training of hospital staff will be done mainly in the afternoons since mornings at the hospitals are usually busy with outpatient care. Some shadowing opportunities will be available in the mornings. Some of these telemedicine service projects are located in the outlying rural areas a couple of hours from Arusha.
