Pediatric Hospital Medicine and Global Health: A Fitting Niche for an Emerging Subspecialty
As North American hospitals serve increasingly diverse patient populations, including recent immigrants, refugees, and returned travelers, all pediatric hospitalists (PHs) require foundational competency in global health, and a subset of PHs are carving out niches focused in global health. Pediatric hospitalists are uniquely positioned to collaborate with low- and middle-income country clinicians and child health advocates to improve the health of hospitalized children worldwide. Using the 2018 WHO standards for improving the quality of care for children and adolescents worldwide, we describe how PHs’ skills align closely with what the WHO and others have identified as essential elements to bring high-quality, sustainable care to children in low- and middle-income countries. Furthermore, North American global health hospitalists bring home expertise that reciprocally benefits their home institutions.
Do efforts to standardize, assess and improve the quality of health service provision to adolescents by government-run health services in low and middle income countries, lead to improvements in service-quality and service-utilization by adolescents?
