Global Medical Brigades

Global Medical Brigades is a program of Global Brigades, Inc., the worlds’ largest student-led global health and sustainable development organization. By utilizing our unique holistic model, we mobilize student volunteers and professionals to empower under-resourced communities in developing countries , as well as in our home communities via secular programs that improve communities’ quality of life while respecting local culture and supporting an eventual transition to self-sustainability. Global Medical Brigades does not support paternalism or voluntourism.

Members will be able to travel on annual medical brigades to Honduras or Belize to conduct mobile clinics and health workshops in communities that typically lack doctors in a twenty-mile radius. During this time, they will have the opportunity to shadow physicians and assist with in-take, triage, medication packing, and health education while interacting with community members (50 contact hours). Members will also be able to help organize on-campus speaker sessions that raise awareness about global health inequities and international perspectives on medical issues and sustainable health.

Please note that it is not necessary to be fluent in Spanish to participate in a brigade. We will have translators available with us at all times, and we will also teach members useful Medical Spanish phrases prior to the brigade.

The Johns Hopkins chapter of Global Medical Brigades seeks to resolve global health disparities by providing dental, vision, and pharmaceutical treatment to underserved Central American communities that do not otherwise have the means to obtain or pay for medical services. We also educate community members on oral hygiene and menstrual health and train “community health workers” to ensure that a knowledge of healthy habits and a structure of medical professionals remains after the mobile clinic concludes.