A historical, cultural, and medical guide for those planning to do health-related work in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean

Students and health practitioners traveling abroad seek insightful, culturally relevant background material to orient them to the environment in which they will be living and working. No single book currently provides this contextual background and global health perspective.

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Endorsements:

“The endeavor once known as “international health,” with deep roots in colonial and neocolonial medicine, has been transformed over the past three decades to emerge as the new field of global health equity. This field, or the best of it, is informed more by notions of solidarity and by social medicine than its predecessors were. That’s in large part because many of the young physicians now helping to build this field really do their homework. Building Partnerships in the Americas: A Guide for Global Health Workers brings together a group of clinicians, several of whom I’ve been lucky enough to work with closely, to help us all do our homework and to share lessons learned in the clinic and the field. These case studies are opened with an incisive overview of the ranking challenges before us by Dartmouth’s Margo Krasnoff, editor and architect of this superb volume, and is followed by lessons learned in Guatemala and El Salvador and Nicaragua, still scarred by civil conflict and worse; in Chiapas 20 years after a rebellion over precisely such matters as access to health care, which has since expanded rapidly if unevenly in Mexico; in Haiti before and after an earthquake; and in the Dominican Republic in the throes of rapid social change and persistent, even growing, disparities. Each chapter moves easily between the specifics—of local social and cultural history, of health systems, and of commonly encountered pathologies, social and medical—and the general principles useful in seeking to serve effectively in communities all too often cut off from effective and humane medical care but actively struggling for the right to such services. This series of in-depth cases studies, richly informed by long and often difficult experience and linked together by Krasnoff’s masterful “connective tissue,” answers a great, and until now, unmet need. For all those—from students and trainees (whether in the health professions or not) to senior clinicians and staff now turning towards global health—who ask what to read before going to work in these settings, Building Partnerships in the Americas is the answer. It’s sure to become the go-to volume for those deeply engaged in such work, and also answers the question of what academic medical centers have to offer as partners in the struggle for global health equity. But the book will also be of interest to all of us interested in lessons we might learn from addressing health disparities across national boundaries and within our own unequal societies.”

—Paul Farmer, M.D.