The International Medicine Fellowship at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University, Department of Emergency Medicine, is designed to be a one-year of specialty training. There is no formal board certification or accreditation for this fellowship.
This leaves the design up to the Fellowship Committee made up of Drs. Walter “Ted” Kuhn and Hartmut Gross. However, because of the tropical medicine component of the fellowship, graduating fellows will be eligible to sit for the Examination to earn the Certificate of Knowledge in Clinical Tropical Medicine and Traveler’s Heath issued by the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Naturally, as fellows have particular interests, their special requests always receive high priority in the curriculum. Funding via the Emergency Medicine track will be through revenues generated as a half-time faculty member in the Department of Emergency Medicine.
Our Fellowship will train you in Travel Health and Tropical Medicine. In addition
to weekly conferences, there will be fieldwork in the developing world, typically
in somewhat austere environments. Work will be with faculty as well as workers in
the field, doing health care, laboratory investigations, and treatment using resources
brought as well as locally available. By the end of the training, Fellows are expected
to be able to organize a destination, supplies, and volunteers, and safely lead a
team into the developing world, direct all fieldwork, and return the team safely.
The Fellowship is tailored for individuals who plan to do extensive fieldwork in the developing world, either in a single country or directing various different teams all around the world and being a go-to resource/medical director for those teams as they encounter issues before, while in, or after returning home from abroad. Our fellowship level of training far exceeds the level needed by the causal traveler or clinician who can only spend a few weeks in the field each year.
Please note that our Fellowship program is NOT International EMERGENCY Medicine, but International Medicine. Hence there is no sister hospital in another country nor an emergency department or EMS service being created or supported in our program.
The intent for the fellowship is to train physicians in tropical and travel medicine to position them in a leadership role to not only direct personal teams into the developing world, but to direct many teams simultaneously. In that role, they will also function as resource for problems in the field as well as “back home.” They will further analyze data gathered in the field and implement changes and projects to make sustainable changes, both on small scale and later on a large scale. It is our hope that our graduates will ultimately become leaders of large international organizations who provide aid, relief, and improvement to the developing world. This could be applied on a continual basis or response service in times of natural or manmade disaster.
The curriculum was designed to address three core specialty areas. While it is not possible to address 100% of these core content areas during a 1-year fellowship, it is expected that the fellow will have considerable knowledge (albeit sometimes incomplete) in all the core content areas. Upon fellowship completion, knowledge in these three core areas positions the fellow to assume a leadership role in the international health community. The three areas are:
