In February, Internal Medicine Resident Golsa Joodi, MD, MPH, kept hearing about COVID-19, or coronavirus, during conversations with friends in Iran.
Joodi earned her medical degree from Tehran University of Medical Sciences. She then emigrated to the United States to pursue residency, while many of her classmates stayed in Iran, and are now junior attendings in hospitals across Tehran, Iran’s capital city.
“I'm in touch with them constantly,” Joodi explained. “They are the front lines of pandemic in Iran. I heard how much of their efforts are going into this, and how many amazing things they're doing, and all the progress being made. They were already putting so much of their time and effort into this pandemic, when there was not much concern about the emerging public health crisis yet in the United States.”
Joodi knew that residents at Yale School of Medicine (YSM) could learn a lot from their Iranian colleagues, so she approached Chief Resident Leila Haghighat, MD, MPhil, with the idea to host a Zoom “Morning Report” to learn from their experiences.
The meeting was held on March 31, and featured 5 attendings from Imam Khomeini Hospital Complex, from different specialties including Emergency Medicine, Internal Medicine, and Infectious Diseases. They shared various clinical insights with 80 Yale residents and faculty on the call.
Mark D. Siegel, MD, FCCP, FACP, professor of medicine (pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine) and program director, Traditional Internal Medicine Residency, was thrilled with the meeting. “Spectacular doesn’t begin to describe the value of today’s morning report with our colleagues in Iran. We learned so much from their experience: infection control, critical care therapeutics, discharge planning, ED triage, protection of healthcare workers, role of CT scan, use of hydroxychloroquine, etc. Thank you to Golsa and Leila for arranging the session.”
Haghighat praised the experience. “I think that this was a good model of how we have been able to have a cross-country communication for something that is inherently a cross-country major health issue. We talk about we're all in this together. There's a famous poem by Saadi Shirazi entitled ‘Bani Adam’ that basically says, "Humanity is one, humanity is one kind.” I think that what Golsa has initiated is a beautiful example of that. The hope is that this is an example of how you can cross countries and communicate and learn from one another because we're all in this together, so that's one. I think that it's going to foster more collaboration with countries we may not have collaborated with in the past.”
As for future collaborations with Iran, Joodi says yes. “I think this is one of the lessons we can learn moving forward, not only in the topic of COVID, but other things, that we can build upon international collaborations,” Joodi said. “Yale's openness to international collaboration in global health is definitely a big part of why I came up with this idea. I think if I were somewhere else, I probably wouldn't have felt as encouraged.”
To learn more about the Residency Training Programs within the Department of Internal Medicine, visit Residency Training Programs. To watch the Zoom session, visit COVID-19 Tools & Updates (scroll to bottom of page for video link).