Office of Global Health

The mission of the Department of Internal Medicine’s Office of Global Health is to confront the disparities in global health through research, education and health services in partnership with institutions serving resource-limited communities around the world.

In partnership with the Yale/Stanford Johnson & Johnson Global Health Scholars Program, the Office of Global Health provides career-changing experiences for medical residents who want to help patients in greatest need while seeking to expand their own understanding of human health and disease by seeing how medicine is practiced in other parts of the world. Through our other activities, we help to build “human infrastructure” to improve care of patients in under-resourced communities around the world. Our long-term commitments to partner sites in South Africa, Uganda, Liberia, Rwanda and Indonesia are to benefit patients and physicians in these host countries while improving training of US-based physicians in global health.

Physicians in the program are both learners and teachers when they visit a host site. They may bring equipment as well as educational materials to help the site expand its capacity to care for the sick. In turn, they are re-introduced to the diagnostic value of such time-tested practices as the physical exam and the taking a thorough medical history.

Our partner sites also send physicians for further training to Yale. Our program is in Kampala, Uganda, at Mulago Hospital, the teaching hospital of Makerere University. Yale faculty and residents work side by side with their counterparts from Makerere, and physicians from Makerere come to New Haven for training in selected subspecialties critical to providing better care to their patients. This site also serves as a site for bilateral exchange between students at Yale School of Medicine and Makerere College of Health Sciences. The program in Tugela Ferry, in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa, run by Dr. Gerald Friedland is primarily a research site for evaluation of diagnosis and treatment of HIV/TB co-infection while providing a wonderful setting for training of residents interested in this area.

Our program is expanding. We now participate in and sponsor classes in tropical medicine and global health for medical, nursing, physician associate and public health students who seek to understand not just disease diagnosis and treatment, but the social, political, economic and cultural factors that contribute to a community’s health care needs.

This website provides information on sites - local and international- with whom we partner, including the Yale/Stanford Johnson & Johnson Global Health Scholars Program. It also provides information about clinical, education and research opportunities for Yale's medical students, resident physicians, hospitalists and faculty, as well as updates on developing projects.

Asghar Rastegar, M.D.
Founding Director, Office of Global Health, Department of Medicine