Bill Frist, MD

Yesterday Americans woke up to news of a new president-elect: Donald J. Trump. The immediate question for those whose lives focus around lifting the health of individual Americans is, “What does this mean for health care in America?”

At the heart of the answer is uncertainty. Trump is an “unknown unknown” when it comes to deep, thoughtful health policy. He has excelled in many fields, but at best he personally has only dabbled in the field of health care, which accounts for a fifth of our overall economy and affects literally every American. So, to begin to answer the question, we can only start with what he has said on the campaign trail and the bare-boned, seven-point “plan” on his website and conjecture from there.

By Vivian Lei

The A&E. I have enormous appreciation for the staff, nurses, residents, and attendings I met during my time in Guyana. In a short time, they have welcomed me into their emergency department, helped sharpen my clinical skills, and become a second family far from home. What’s more, there are actually some elements of Guyanese health care that I wish for after returning home, such as universal health care and access to primary care. There were many times I could send a patient from the A&E directly to a specialty clinic the same day. I prescribed medications knowing that patients could fill them for free from the hospital pharmacy. Time and again, I was shown ways in which low resource did not equate to low quality care.

By Joseph Reardon

The statistics were just numbers to me until my first few weeks at Georgetown Public Hospital, where suicide attempt is a routine chief complaint and deaths from poisoning and hanging are common in our emergency department. These are just the patients that survive to get to the emergency department. In the US, I had seen plenty of suicidal patients, usually with a minimal gesture like taking 5 tabs of Tylenol in order to buy an admission to a psychiatric ward. In Guyana, suicidal patients mean it, and they are usually successful the first time.

By Joseph Reardon

Global health itself is worth every penny in global peacemaking. If we could tweet out the cross-cultural bridges built during every patient-provider interaction in hospitals like ours, we would dwarf the Olympics in size. Recent articles have described how global health should be situated prominently in the foreign policy plans of governments. The far more difficult and important challenge is to discover how global health efforts can change the hearts and minds of more people and become bridges of peace every day.