How did we create our database of short-term medical volunteer opportunities?

We looked for organizations that operate short-term, primary care medical trips anywhere in Latin America or the Caribbean. Easy?

Not necessarily. Many organizations are defunct, many offer once-off trips that “parachute” into host communities; others offer medical opportunities buried within their primarily non-medical programs; still more are happy to entertain the option of hosting a medical team, as long as you round one up yourself. Lawrence Loh gives a good overview of the many different models that may result in what is commonly known as a short-term medical mission or medical service trip.

Here’s a rough overview of how we put together our collection:

Online databases

We searched through numerous sites with lists of volunteer opportunities abroad, including the following:

Mission Finder
Medical Missions.org
Medical Mission Exchange
Global Health at University of Arizona
International Health Volunteers.org
Haiti Volunteer.org
University of Massachusetts Medicine
Health Care Volunteer.com

Systematic Google search

We used combinations of the terms:
“medical missions”, “short term missions”, and “medical mission organizations”, combined with each individual country in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Social media

We used the Twitter hashtags “medical mission”, “medicalmissions”, and “global health” to find additional organizations.

Cheating

Judith Lasker was kind enough to provide access to a similar search for short-term volunteer trips, created for her book “Hoping to Help”. Her search was based on a Google search that included combinations of the terms:

“international health volunteering”, “Christian health volunteering”, “religious health volunteering”, “corporate global health volunteering”, “international health fellowships”, “international health educational opportunities”, “global health director”, “international service learning”, “global health elective”, “medical school international internships”, “intercultural learning”, “global health volunteer projects university” and “international volunteer organizations”.

Rinse, repeat

The landscape of short-term medical volunteering is constantly changing and evolving, as some groups fold, merge, or change their focus, and new groups spring up to take their place. If we have missed your primary care medical volunteer project, please let us know.