The Global Health Education Consortium, or ‘GHEC’ for short, was founded in 1991 as a non-governmental agency. There are active members in the USA, Caribbean and Canada.
The GHEC is made up from various institutions and universities around these countries in many different regions. The main aim for them. is to not only improve the health of populations and countries which do not have the funding and resources to do so themselves, but to improve their basic human rights as well, as these often come hand in hand with the way people are treated when taken ill or their countries governments do not have enough understanding of certain diseases. They aim to do this by starting at the very beginning of the process and improving the education of health care professionals worldwide. Poor education and information on health care, diseases, and incorrect containment procedure can not only lead to spread of disease in under developed but also Western civilisation as well. It is clear from the recent Ebola outbreak that the work of the GHEC has never been more important.There are four areas in which they hope to change. Career development, education policy, clinical training and training materials development. The GHEC work hard to set up exchanges between health care students and even revered, experienced professionals so they may see how things are done differently in different regions and then not only share ideas on how they currently work, but take back ideas on how working in the future may change.
The most recent project the GHEC have undertaken, has resulted in five new teaching modules which were created with the help of under-developed countries. Not only have these five modules been created specifically to be beneficial to developing countries, but they have also been designed to keep in mind more technologically advanced countries who could still benefit from the same modules. Another part of the project ensures that some English modules are going to be translated to Latin American, so the educational experience can be transcended to South America, which is among one of the poorest regions when it comes to health care. Although there are developed countries within South America like Brazil, corruption usually ensures that not enough funding is put into the health care system for actual treatments, let alone for training and development for it’s work force.Wherever it maybe be in the world, however much money the health care system invests, it will still not be enough to facilitate the on-going training in an ever changing environment. The GHEc aims to rectify this.