Costs and benefits: An ethical analysis tool for short-term global health field study programs

The number of academic global health programs within US-based universities has increased over the past ten years. Today, most medical and global public health programs include some type of overseas field study component. There appears to be collective agreement that institutions who send students on short-term field study experiences in resource-poor countries have a minimum moral obligation to ensure that host institutions are not worse off as a result of their collaboration. Considering the benefits to US-based students in terms of their awareness to global health issues and their opportunity to apply didactic training to practical situations, we argue that sending institutions are also obliged to ensure that host institutions benefit from the partnership. There are several barriers to assessing the costs and benefits of these partnerships including the sending institutions lack of initiative, the host institutions fear of disrupting the partnership and unclear guidelines for how to make this calculation. The objective of this project is to develop an online tool for calculating the benefit and the burden of short-term global health field study experiences that can be adapted to any institutional partnership. Data from five large sending universities and fifteen recipient organizations is collected and analyzed using iterative versions of an adapted version of cost-benefit analysis tool. A new tool is developed using the results of these analyses.