The Gambia – UMB and Its Duty of Care: Building Resilient Health Systems with Host Country Partners
Melissa McDiarmid, MD, MPH, DABT, Professor, Director of Occupational & Environmental Medicine, and Joanna Gaitens, PhD, MSN/MPH, Assistant Professor, UM School of Medicine
Collaborator: Bill Roberts, MA, PhD, St. Mary’s College of Maryland
This project builds on UMB faculty’s Global Inter-Professional Education (IPE) and WHO Collaborating Center for Occupational Health activities, to strengthen health systems through preventive efforts to protect health workers, and their ongoing collaboration with the University of The Gambia (UTG) and Gambian Ministry of Health (MoH). Our three-year President’s Global Impact Project goals proposed to design, promote and implement a signature identify for all UMB Global Programs guided by the ethical construct termed "duty of care." This attitude commits UMB to act in ways to protect health worker collaborators from unreasonable risks of harm. To achieve this, we proposed to draft and validate, together with Gambian colleagues, in a pilot effort, a Gambian national health and safety policy for health workers, and from that document, to derive and implement a safety tool kit of health worker protections, across UMB global programs.