Healthcare provides a unique opportunity to engage the deepest issues of life and faith alongside those who are suffering. Can you care for patients in a way that brings them before Jesus and offers them peace, healing, and wholeness? Discover how to practice healthcare as your ministry…starting even now as a student or resident.

In 2010, The Continuing Medical and Dental Education Commission of CMDA approved a working group to investigate the experience of medical missionaries with a view to providing information to assist mission agencies in setting a current and sustainable medical mission strategy. The PRISM (Patterns and Responses in Intercultural Service in Medicine) survey is a research report that summarizes those findings. This talk will involve a discussion of the salient, challenging, and sometimes surprising findings of what our full-time, long-term cross-cultural colleagues are facing today.

Although the principles of medical and dental care are the same worldwide, the need for translation, existing local health beliefs, customs, teaching methods, and other social and political factors may present barriers which have a significant impact on the effectiveness of efforts to teach healthcare professionals cross-culturally. This session will examine several of these.

This session will compare short term mission efforts which provide direct care to patients in an area to those which provide education and advanced training to healthcare professionals, which most often have a longer term benefit both to those who are taught by these healthcare professionals and to patients needing healthcare in that area.

Have you longed to integrate your Christian faith into your patient care – both on the mission field abroad and in your work at home? Not sure how to do this in a caring, sensitive, and relevant manner? This “working” session will explore the ethical basis for spiritual care plus provide you with profession, timely, and practical methods to care for the whole person in the clinical setting.

This session will give an overview of the current picture of trafficking in persons within the United States focusing mainly on child sex trafficking, the major form of trafficking in persons within the U.S. In addition, the session will address specific ways that health professionals can become abolitionists.

Healthcare missionaries serving in emerging cultures confront a complex set of ethical issues that may not be obvious at first glance. This session will discuss the unique ethical challenges of ministering to underserved populations, with an emphasis on resource limitations, cultural taboos, and human justice.