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Economic assessment of US physician participation in short-term medical missions

BACKGROUND: Short term medical missions (STMMs) are a form of unregulated and unsanctioned, grass roots, direct medical service aid from wealthier countries to low and middle income countries. The US leads the world in STMM activity. The magnitude of monetary and man power inputs towards STMMs is no...

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Autores principales: Caldron, Paul H., Impens, Ann, Pavlova, Milena, Groot, Wim
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4994162/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27549787
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12992-016-0183-7
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author Caldron, Paul H.
Impens, Ann
Pavlova, Milena
Groot, Wim
author_facet Caldron, Paul H.
Impens, Ann
Pavlova, Milena
Groot, Wim
author_sort Caldron, Paul H.
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Short term medical missions (STMMs) are a form of unregulated and unsanctioned, grass roots, direct medical service aid from wealthier countries to low and middle income countries. The US leads the world in STMM activity. The magnitude of monetary and man power inputs towards STMMs is not clear. The objective of this study is to estimate the prevalence of physician participation in STMMs from the US and the related expenditures of cash and resources. METHODS: An online survey solicited information on physician participation in STMMs. Responses regarding costs were aggregated to estimate individual and global expenditures. RESULTS: Sample statistics from 601 respondent physicians indicate an increasing participation by US physicians in STMMs. Including opportunity cost, average total economic inputs for an individual physician pursuing an STMM exceed $11,000. Composite expenditures for STMM deployment from the US are estimated at near $3.7 billion annually and the resource investment equates with nearly 5800 physician fulltime equivalents. CONCLUSIONS: STMM participation and mission numbers have been increasing in the millennium. The aggregate costs are material when benchmarked against formal US aid transfers. Understanding the drivers of physician volunteerism in this activity is thereby worthy of study and relevant to future policy deliberation.
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spelling pubmed-49941622016-08-24 Economic assessment of US physician participation in short-term medical missions Caldron, Paul H. Impens, Ann Pavlova, Milena Groot, Wim Global Health Research BACKGROUND: Short term medical missions (STMMs) are a form of unregulated and unsanctioned, grass roots, direct medical service aid from wealthier countries to low and middle income countries. The US leads the world in STMM activity. The magnitude of monetary and man power inputs towards STMMs is not clear. The objective of this study is to estimate the prevalence of physician participation in STMMs from the US and the related expenditures of cash and resources. METHODS: An online survey solicited information on physician participation in STMMs. Responses regarding costs were aggregated to estimate individual and global expenditures. RESULTS: Sample statistics from 601 respondent physicians indicate an increasing participation by US physicians in STMMs. Including opportunity cost, average total economic inputs for an individual physician pursuing an STMM exceed $11,000. Composite expenditures for STMM deployment from the US are estimated at near $3.7 billion annually and the resource investment equates with nearly 5800 physician fulltime equivalents. CONCLUSIONS: STMM participation and mission numbers have been increasing in the millennium. The aggregate costs are material when benchmarked against formal US aid transfers. Understanding the drivers of physician volunteerism in this activity is thereby worthy of study and relevant to future policy deliberation. BioMed Central 2016-08-22 /pmc/articles/PMC4994162/ /pubmed/27549787 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12992-016-0183-7 Text en © The Author(s). 2016 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Research
Caldron, Paul H.
Impens, Ann
Pavlova, Milena
Groot, Wim
Economic assessment of US physician participation in short-term medical missions
title Economic assessment of US physician participation in short-term medical missions
title_full Economic assessment of US physician participation in short-term medical missions
title_fullStr Economic assessment of US physician participation in short-term medical missions
title_full_unstemmed Economic assessment of US physician participation in short-term medical missions
title_short Economic assessment of US physician participation in short-term medical missions
title_sort economic assessment of us physician participation in short-term medical missions
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4994162/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27549787
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12992-016-0183-7
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