By Diana García, Program Director

First of all, congratulations to MEDICC Alumni Steve, Eraka, Molina, Melanie, Ralf, Elizabeth, Randall, Vivian, Nicole, Geeta, Eunice, Melissa, and "Miguelito" on receiving your MDs! 

This last offer is "pioneered" by medical students Kyoko Peña and Julia Iwamasa, through the Center for Sex Education in Havana and the Ramón González Coro Maternity Hospital.  They are spending four weeks between the two institutions, field trips and seminars.

Academic Council....

The decision to go ahead with the Reproductive Health pilot program was made at the spring meeting of MEDICC's Academic Council and Executive Committee, held in Cienfuegos Province, Cuba.  We hope that the results will merit a full-fledged elective for medical and health sciences students next year.  We'll keep you posted.

During the spring trip, Council members also visited 4^th -year medical students at the Villa Clara Medical School, site of their six-week clinical elective in Family Medicine.

Academic Council members with 4th-year students during their clinical elective at the Villa Clara Medical School in April.

The Council welcomed Dr. Alejandro García Gutiérrez as a new member. Dr. García Gutiérrez is the "dean" of Cuban surgeons and heads the Cuban Surgical Society.  He replaces Dr. Juan Carrizo who was named Rector of the Latin American and Caribbean Medical School in Havana, newly established to offer scholarships to medical students from the countries hit last year by Hurricane Mitch. (See Health News from Cuba, MEDICC Review, Vol I., No.1).

Council members Dr. Al Brann, Dr. Garcia Gutierrez and Dr. Al Kuperman; and Mary King, Board member of the Arca Foundation, one of MEDICC's generous supporters, on a field visit during the April meeting of the Council in Cuba.

We also invite you to take a look at the Medical Meetings in Cuba section of our website, which carries notice of this September's 13^th Latin American Surgery Congress in Havana, for which MEDICC is offering a special package for U.S. and Canadian surgeons and residents. 

Cuban Nephrologists...

MEDICC was pleased to sponsor attendance at the American Society of Transplantation Scientific Meeting (May 15-21, Chicago) by Dr. Raúl Herrera, the Director of Cuba's national Institute of Nephrology in Havana.  He also took the opportunity to meet with Dr. Daniel Batlle, Director of the Division of Nephrology and Hypertension, Northwestern University Medical School.  The Division is partnered with the Cuban Institute through a program of the International Nephrology Society.  MEDICC hopes to sponsor working visits to the United States by other Cuban medical professionals, as a contribution to building ties between the two medical communities. 

Drs. Raúl Herrera and Daniel Batlle in Chicago. Drs. Raúl Herrera and Daniel Batlle in Chicago.

First MEDICC Workshop...

Thirty deans, faculty, administrators and MEDICC directors attended the First MEDICC Workshop in Havana in June.  Panels from the Pinar del Río and Villa Clara Medical Schools, as well as the National School of Public Health, presented their initiatives in curriculum development for MEDICC electives and their experiences with MEDICC students thus far. 

The purpose of the workshop was to draw practical recommendations from their presentations to improve the MEDICC program for next year.  Some of these were:  build in more clinical and field-trip time, as opposed to seminars; encourage more interaction with Cuban medical and public health students; introduce a greater degree of flexibility in the program where possible; and produce key materials on the Cuban public health system in English, to distribute to students before they come to the island.  I think Zeida Santos and Mirna Moreno deserve special mention here, for "transforming" the "Spanish for Health Professionals" component of MEDICC electives from a strictly conversational exercise into a rich cross-cultural immersion.  We'll have more on this in our next issue of MEDICC Review.

Dr. Jardines speaking at the First MEDICC Workshop.

Dr. José B. Jardines, Co-Chair of MEDICC's Academic Council and Vice-minister of Public Health for Medical Education, closed the two-day workshop.

Thanks to the 48 U.S. medical and public health schools, which have given their students academic credit for MEDICC electives thus far!  I just returned from Puerto Rico, where I made new MEDICC contacts at the University of Puerto Rico....more on that visit in the fall issue.