On March 20, 2017, the Yale Section of General Internal Medicine hosted a delegation of medicine and public health professionals from Vietnam and Thailand for a symposium on addiction medicine. The delegation included senior faculty and academic leadership from Hanoi Medical University in Hanoi and the University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and from Chiang Mai University in Chiang Mai.
The meeting was led by Patrick G. O'Connor, M.D., M.P.H,, chief and Dan and Amanda Adams Professor of General Internal Medicine, and Jeanette M. Tetrault, M.D., director of the Yale Addiction Medicine fellowship and associate professor of medicine. Both O'Connor and Tetrault have traveled to Hanoi as part of a collaborative effort to enhance addiction research, education, and patient care efforts in Vietnam. The symposium, which included Yale faculty experts on addiction medicine and addiction psychiatry, focused on Yale's efforts to build innovative programs on research, education, and patient care in addiction, and how those programs might inform program development internationally.
The visitors were sponsored by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration as part of an international effort to support capacity building in the areas of addiction and HIV disease.