Global health is an “area for study, research, and practice that places a priority on improving health and achieving health equity for all people worldwide” (Koplan et al, 2009. Lancet). Although progress has been made in recent years, globally 7.6 million children under 5 died in 2010, mostly from preventable illness (Liu et al, 2012. Lancet). The Montreal Children’s Hospital (MCH) serves an increasingly large multicultural population, has renowned expertise in medical education and research, and has a long-standing commitment to the health of vulnerable children within Quebec and in low-income countries. The Global Child Health Program aims to capitalize on the strengths of the MCH and the McGill Department of Pediatrics to help sustainably meet the needs of children in low-income countries, and improve the care provided to its multicultural clientele in Quebec.
The McGill Department of Pediatrics and the Montreal Children’s Hospital’s (MCH) has over four decades of engagement in global health. This began with a project in Nairobi, Kenya in the early 1970s, where the first academic Department of Pediatrics in East Africa was established. This was followed by an eight year (1987-1994) initiative in Ethiopia which assisted in founding a Department of Community Health at Addis Ababa University and strengthened the country’s public heath capacity through the training of nearly 300 district health officers and over 50 Masters of Public Health graduates. From 1998 to 2003, MCH faculty led a population child health project in Chelyabinsk, Russia. This project assisted the local state medical university to transition to modern approaches in assessing the health of their under 14 population, identifying important determinants and establishing evidence based priorities and programs. In addition to these large-scale projects, many Department of Pediatrics and MCH faculty and staff have worked and continue to work on global health initiatives either individually, or via their divisions and departments.
In 2009, a multi-disciplinary global child health steering committee, the “Global Child Health Initiative”, was formed at the MCH and included pediatricians, surgeons, residents, nurses and a physiotherapist with experience and interest in global health. This initiative obtained official program status in 2014 as the Global Child Health Program, under the McGill Department of Pediatrics, and its multi-disciplinary steering committee remains operational to this day.