A multicultural meal at the home of one of the program directors

Can you imagine Israeli, Palestinian, Jordanian and Canadian medical students, enjoying Toronto’s sights, cooking and eating multicultural meals together, planning cooperative medical research projects, and learning together about caring for children in the emergency department of a major Canadian hospital? (1)

It happened this summer in Toronto during the International Pediatric Emergency Medicine Elective (IPEME) organized by the Canada International Scientific Exchange Program (CISEPO), the Peter A. Silverman Centre for International Health at Mount Sinai Hospital, and the Division of Paediatric Emergency Medicine at the Hospital for Sick Children.

As medical students, the elective offered us an excellent opportunity to learn about paediatric emergency medicine and international health, while developing a better understanding of each others’ cultures and perspectives. Medical education consisted of lectures on common topics in paediatric emergency medicine, such as fever, sepsis, abdominal pain, poisoning and jaundice. We also attended workshops on casting, suturing, and cardio-pulmonary resuscitation. Can you imagine Israeli and Palestinian students put casts on one another, laughing the whole time and making a complete mess? Despite our different backgrounds, we had a wonderful time together. (more…)

 Feroze Sidhwa spent his elective working with the Palestine Medical Relief Society and reports on it here. He has also written a related article on food security

Feroze with the ER staff at Ahli Hospital

This summer I volunteered in the occupied Palestinian territories at al-Ahli Hospital and with a non-governmental organization named the Palestinian Medical Relief Society (PMRS). Both are located in Hebron, the largest city in the southern West Bank and the only Palestinian city with Israeli soldiers and “settlers” permanently based in the heart of the city.

One of the many Israeli roadblocks the mobile clinic circumnavigates every day

At Ahli I spent most of my time in the ER. Patients presented with a wide variety of emergent problems, the most interesting being work-related trauma and occupation-related gunshot wounds and psychological problems. The physicians and nurses trained me to carry out simple procedures: suturing, irrigating soiled wounds, taking ECGs, etc.

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