By Natalia V. Galarza, MD and Kristina Diaz, MD
Global health has been identified as an increasing field of interest in medicine. As Koplan et al, mention, it can be thought as a notion, depending on current events. A definition for global health has never really been reached by consensus, and so it seems that global health can be adapted to the necessities of the location and time.
Many definitions touch on the fact that global health should improve health and achieve equity for all people and protect against global threats that disregard national borders.(1,2) It has deep connections with public health, blurring the boundaries between public health and global health. Within these connections, we have “border health” as a unique part of public health, with many characteristics being shared with the broader “global health.” For family medicine residency programs that are geographically located near the United States-Mexico border, the teaching of border health is embedded seamlessly in the medical resident education, so much that we tend to diminish its importance and gravitate toward other subjects of public and global health. It is easy to overlook the unique populations that we have in our own communities and focus on those that are more conventional and shared with other residency program or educational goals.
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