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Background: Global health electives offer medical trainees the opportunity to broaden their clinical horizons. Canadian universities have been encouraged by regulatory bodies to offer institutional support to medical students going abroad; however, the extent to which such support is available to residents has not been extensively studied.Methods: We conducted a survey study of Canadian universities examining the institutional support available to post-graduate medical trainees before, during, and after global health electives.Results: Responses were received from 8 of 17 (47%) Canadian institutions. Results show that trainees are being sent to diverse locations around the world with more support than recommended by post-graduate regulatory bodies. However, we found that the content of the support infrastructure varies amongst universities and that certain components—pre-departure training, best practices, risk management, and post-return debriefing—could be more thoroughly addressed.Conclusion: Canadian universities are encouraged to continue to send their trainees on global health electives. To address the gaps in infrastructure reported in this study, the authors suggest the development of comprehensive standardized guidelines by post-graduate regulatory/advocacy bodies to better ensure patient and participant safety. We also encourage the centralization of infrastructure management to the universities’ global health departments to aid in resource management.

Postpartum education can save lives of mothers and babies in developing countries, and the World Health Organization recommends all mothers receive three postpartum consultations. More information is needed to better understand how postpartum education is delivered and ultimately improves postpartum health outcomes. The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine how postpartum care was delivered in three postnatal hospital clinics in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Semistructured interviews with 10 nurse-midwives and three obstetricians were conducted. Feminist poststructuralism guided the research process. Postpartum education was seen to be an urgent matter; there was a lack of supportive resources and infrastructure in the hospital clinics, and nurse-midwives and obstetricians had to negotiate conflicting health and traditional discourses using various strategies. Nurse-midwives and obstetricians are well positioned to deliver life-saving postpartum education; however, improvements are required including increased number of nurse-midwives and obstetricians.

Medical schools recognize that they have an important social mandate beyond their primary role to educate future physicians. The instantiation of social accountability (SA) within faculties of medicine requires intentional, effective partnering with diverse internal and external stakeholders. Despite early, promising academic work in the field of SA in medical education, there remains a lack of conceptual clarity about what SA could and should entail, and a lack of practical direction regarding how it could be implemented. The paper describes the development of an innovative SA framework that incorporates both pragmatic-evaluation and collaborative-enhancement components. The framework consists of five distinct phases, uses a deliberative engagement methodology, and is meaningfully informed by a set of four SA Lenses: Diversity, Inclusion and Cultural Responsiveness; Equity; Community / Stakeholder Engagement and Partnering; and Justice-Fairness and Sustainability. In addition to using the framework to evaluate and enhance the social accountability statuses of a variety of the medical school's operational components, Dalhousie Faculty of Medicine leaders are committed to applying the framework's SA Lenses to important decision-making processes, such as the revision of the medical school's strategic directions and the allocation of limited resources to address important, emerging medical education issues and challenges.

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