Physicians For Peace

Our goals include increasing surgical capacity to strengthen delivery of surgical care in local communities by:

• training physicians, nurses, registrars, residents and clinical officers;
• ensuring successful patient recovery through strengthening post-operative care, critical care, and rehabilitation;
• ensuring the availability of proper anesthesia providers and medications;
• contributing to enduring education and training programs sustainable at the local level through creation of protocols and procedures,
• implementing monitoring and evaluation, leadership training; and
• fostering long term connections with and among trainees, as they become trainers themselves and colleagues in our work going forward.

For more than 30 years, Physicians for Peace (PFP) has contributed medical expertise, combined with compassion, commitment and cultural competency, to address the need for training and education that builds surgical capacity in under-served communities. We accomplish this by investing in long term partnerships centered on education, connecting medical expertise with defined needs, and responding and adapting to situational changes over time.

Our volunteer experts in surgical care, along with PFP’s staff and board of directors, are united in the belief that the capacity to provide quality local surgical care is essential to transforming lives and communities, and that peer-to-peer partnerships that address locally identified gaps in training and education are the most effective and sustainable methods to achieve these goals.

We identify and develop strong in-country partnerships with local governments, hospitals, academia and professional societies and provide visiting faculty as both short-term and long-term volunteer medical educators, working as multidisciplinary teams to develop curricula and teach leadership skills.

We provide salary support for key in-country personnel functioning as extensions of PFP’s staff. Our peer-to-peer approach is expanded in reach through technology to enhance communications and maintain continuing education and mentorship activities. We also foster relationships within the global health community, actively engaging in global health discourse in order to serve as an active voice advocating for under-served surgical patients and under-resourced surgical providers.

At the core of our organizational strength is a cadre of dedicated volunteer medical educators who are committed to building capacity to provide sustained, quality, safe surgical care.

To leverage our resources, we strategically partner with in-country colleagues, hospitals, academic institutions, professional societies, as well as other non-profits. Whenever possible we use low cost, high impact tools for communicating and training.

In Malawi, a country of 19 million with just 60 surgeons and 6 anesthesiologists, our multi-year, multidisciplinary in-country training contributes to building a stronger surgical care workforce. PFP helped start up the first pediatric ICU in Malawi, contributing a long term volunteer intensivist physician overseeing education and systems creation, longitudinal expert pediatric nurse training, and ongoing mentorship and systems development. We’ve nurtured a partnership with the non-profit, Raising Malawi, supporting the Pediatric Surgical and Intensive Care Centre’s success, and collaborate with several other Malawian organizations.

Building on a long history of strong partnerships across Latin America, PFP improves the skills of multi-disciplinary burn care professionals from local burn units that collectively treat thousands annually. Many who have received PFP training and education are now trainers themselves, leading education and training in the region, strengthening capacity and sustainability for the benefit of patients and their families. This strategy extends PFP’s impact and facilitates continuing education, training support and the adoption and sharing of best practices among burn care professionals in the region. We created burn surgery rehabilitation certification, adapting a Burn Rehabilitation Therapist Competency tool aligned with the International Society for Burn Injuries, to ensure each Latin American partner country has at least one expert burn therapist teaching their peers gold standards of care and serving as a valuable regional resource.