About

The Global Health (GH) Program at Danbury Hospital (later Nuvance Health) was established in 2012 by Founding Director Dr. Majid Sadigh. This was done in partnership with the University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine (UVMLCOM), the students of which were undergoing core clinical rotations at Danbury Hospital (the Connecticut campus). In many ways, it was the interest of UVMLCOM students in GH that was the impetus towards establishment of the Nuvance Health-UVMLCOM GH Program.

From its inception, the Nuvance Health GH Program was always focused on GH education and using education as a sustainable means to improve clinical outcomes. The first major goal for the new GH Program was to establish partnerships with several international partner sites—in Uganda, Dominican Republic, Zimbabwe, with other sites such as Vietnam, Thailand, India, Botswana, and Armenia joining later. Importantly, all international partnerships were based on the following main founding principles: mutual respect and reciprocity, cultural sensitivity, bi-directionality, equity and inclusivity, and sustainability. A memorandum of understanding outlining the broad terms of the partnership was signed with each site.

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These international partnerships made the Nuvance Health GH Program uniquely positioned to offer six-week-long GH electives to medical students. This was first offered only to students from UVMLCOM, but since 2015-2016 students from two Caribbean medical schools, American University of the Caribbean and Ross University School of Medicine, also started participating in these electives.

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In the spirit of bidirectionality of the partnerships with international sites, junior faculty from each site traveled to the U.S. and were hosted by Nuvance Health as GH Scholars to train in their fields of clinical specialty towards the greater mission of capacity building.

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Under Dr. Sadigh’s keen and enthusiastic leadership, the GH Program quickly outgrew its initial founding goals of being an exchange program for students and faculty. The variety of educational activities, research, advocacy, and policy influence work that was being done through the GH Program made it clear that the program had evolved so much that the launch of the GH Academy was the next natural step of developing GH initiatives.