Global health
We can connect students to health systems, community health, social determinants, local professionals, longitudinal patient stories, and structural barriers.
For Faculty & Universities
Turn the Country Into the Classroom.
Tell us what you want your students to learn. MEDLIFE will help you build the field experience around it.
Our faculty-led field education programs combine local relationships, community access, experienced in-country teams, educational site visits, service and development opportunities, logistics, risk support, and facilitated reflection to help universities create international courses that could not be reproduced on campus.
Your institution owns the academic course. MEDLIFE helps make the field work.
Do Not Start With an Itinerary.
Not this
“What tourist sites can we fit around volunteer days?”
Start here
“What should students understand, compare, question, and be able to defend by the end of this course?”
Then we build outward.
The destination becomes curriculum
Build the Field Around the Course You Already Teach
International development
We can build around community organizations, infrastructure, livelihoods, NGOs, government, business, migration, and locally led projects.
Culture & sustainability
We can connect museums, markets, farms, traditional knowledge, environmental sites, conservation, Indigenous communities, local enterprise, and development.
Course architecture
Preparation → Field Laboratory → Synthesis
Before departure
Students arrive with concepts instead of assumptions.
- Assigned readings
- Historical and political context
- Cultural humility
- Ethics of international service
- Language preparation where relevant
- Faculty lectures
- Research questions
- Pre-departure discussions
- Community background
- Safety and logistical preparation
In the field
The country becomes a comparative laboratory.
- Community leaders
- Local professionals
- Hospitals and health posts
- Schools and universities
- NGOs and social enterprises
- Farms, markets, cooperatives, and local businesses
- Government and public systems
- MEDLIFE Reality Tours
- Community-development projects
- Service activities
- Interviews
- Cultural and environmental field experiences
- Daily reflection
- Structured seminars
After return
Students turn experience into analysis.
- Reflection paper
- Comparative essay
- Oral presentation
- Capstone project
- Policy brief
- Group presentation
- Research project
- Final exam
- Applied community-development analysis
Your institution determines the academic requirements and awards any credit.
Proof of model
The Drexel Model: From Ecuador to Tanzania
MEDLIFE's work with Drexel University illustrates what this can look like. An earlier course operated in Ecuador with a field itinerary that moved students through Quito, the Amazon region around Tena, and the Andes around Riobamba.
Students connected structural violence, gender, foreign aid, agrarian reform, migration, healthcare, community development, Indigenous culture, Afro-Ecuadorian culture, agricultural systems, and local enterprise to actual field sites.
The course later expanded to Tanzania, where students used museums, local health systems, markets, coffee production, community visits, cultural traditions, conservation, and development organizations as teaching environments — and it became repeat programming rather than a one-time trip.
That is the model MEDLIFE wants to reproduce: not one group once, but a durable faculty relationship and a course that gets better each year.
Applied learning
Students Need Something Real to Analyze
In Tanzania, the Drexel–MEDLIFE partnership worked with local organization TEDI on a computer-lab project supporting a public-school community. The educational value was larger than the installation itself — a real project lets students ask:
Who identified the need?
Who owns the solution?
Who maintains it?
Which resources came from the community?
Which came from outside?
What happens one year later?
How should success be measured?
What unintended consequences could appear?
That is field education.
An existing pathway
Sometimes the Field Course Already Exists.
By 2020, MEDLIFE had already developed a two-week educational program across Ecuador and Peru with readings, academic discussions, field visits, service, development, patient follow-up, multiple communities, and reflection. Professor Thom Meredith of McGill University believed the existing program could support a field-course pathway with appropriate academic evaluation.
The proposed academic version was interrupted before operating in 2020, but it demonstrated a useful institutional strategy: MEDLIFE can provide a strong, documented field-education core, and a university can add the academic wrapper that fits its own system.
Faculty-led courseInternship creditIndependent studyHonors creditCivic-engagement courseOther approved mechanism
What MEDLIFE handles
Field Infrastructure Faculty Should Not Have to Build Alone
Country and regional expertise
Year-round local staff
Established community partnerships
Local nonprofit and institutional relationships
Itinerary design
Field-course curriculum mapping
Local speakers and experts
Service and development opportunities
Cultural and historical interpretation
Lodging
Ground transportation
Field leaders
Emergency support
Risk documentation
Participant logistics
Educational materials
Reflection frameworks
Repeat-program planning
Faculty remain responsible for course ownership, grading, and institutional academic requirements.
Beyond global health
Field Education Is Bigger Than Global Health.
Global HealthPublic HealthInternational DevelopmentGlobal StudiesGeographySocial JusticeHealth EquityPre-Health EducationNursingPhysician Assistant EducationDentistry / Pre-DentalEducationEnvironmental StudiesSustainabilitySocial EntrepreneurshipCommunity DevelopmentUrban StudiesLatin American StudiesAfrican StudiesMigrationGender StudiesCultural AnthropologyLeadershipCivic Engagement
A course does not need to be “about MEDLIFE.” MEDLIFE can be the field partner helping faculty teach the subject they already care about.
Why MEDLIFE
Local Relationships + Educational Design + Operational Execution
A professor can design a great syllabus. What is much harder is building trusted relationships with communities, arranging field access, identifying local voices, coordinating transport and lodging, maintaining risk protocols, creating service opportunities that do not displace local professionals, and translating learning objectives into a realistic day-by-day experience.
That is the gap MEDLIFE can fill.
Local relationships
Educational design
Operational execution
Sample framework
A Field Course Where Every Day Answers a Question
Day 1
Arrival + orientation + framing question
Day 2
History, culture, and first local perspectives
Day 3
Systems observation: health, education, infrastructure, or governance
Day 4
Economy and livelihoods: markets, agriculture, enterprise, labor, or trade
Day 5
Community partnership / service / development project
Day 6
Second community or region + comparison
Day 7
Culture, identity, and local knowledge
Day 8
Stakeholder interviews + applied project
Day 9
Major environmental or cultural field experience + synthesis
Day 10
Student teach-back + final reflection + departure
A 12- or 14-day version should create deeper comparison and project engagement — not simply add more of the same.
MEDLIFE Supports the Course. Your University Awards the Credit.
MEDLIFE is not asking to replace the university. That is a feature.
Faculty and institutions retain control of
- Course approval
- Enrollment
- Academic standards
- Tuition
- Grading
- Credit
MEDLIFE can provide
- Sample learning objectives
- Field itinerary
- Course description
- Readings
- Reflection prompts
- Field journals
- Assessment ideas
- Participation verification
- Local implementation
- Risk and logistics documentation
This makes the partnership easier to fit into the academic structures universities already trust.
What Do You Want Your Students to Learn?
Tell us the course. Tell us the destination. Tell us the questions you want students to wrestle with. We will help you turn those questions into a field experience.