perceptions of short-term medical volunteer work a qualitative study in guatemala对短期医疗志愿工作在危地马拉的定性研究.pdf

Globalization and Health BioMed Central Research Open Access Perceptions of short-term medical volunteer work: a qualitative study in Guatemala 1 1 2 3 Tyler Green , Heidi Green , Jean Scandlyn* and Andrew Kestler Address: 1School of Medicine, University of Colorado Denver, Denver, Colorado, USA, 2Departments of Anthropology and Health and Behavioral Sciences, University of Colorado Denver, Denver, Colorado, USA and 3Division of Emergency Medicine, University of Colorado Denver, Denver, Colorado, USA Email: Tyler Green - tgreen@; Heidi Green - hgreen@; Jean Scandlyn* - jean.scandlyn@; Andrew Kestler - andrew.kestler@ * Corresponding author Published: 26 February 2009 Received: 12 June 2008 Accepted: 26 February 2009 Globalization and Health 2009, 5:4 doi:10.1186/1744-8603-5-4 This article is available from: /content/5/1/4 © 2009 Green et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Each year medical providers from wealthy countries participate in short-term medical volunteer work in resource-poor countries. Various authors have raised concern that such work has the potential to be harmful to recipient communities; however, the social s