A Description of a Virtual Global Disaster Medicine Fellowship Training Program

Summary: The development of standardized disaster medicine curricula for frontline providers is lacking in the international platform. This report describes the approach utilized by the State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate, an Academic Medical Center in New York. SUNY offers one of the few disaster medicine fellowships in the United States, which also accepts international applicants and non-emergency Medicine (EM) physicians. Previous examples of non-traditional graduates from the program include the Director of the SUNY Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, a Critical Care specialist in India, and an EM physician in Ghana. Each of the non-traditional graduates completes a “virtual” version of the traditional Disaster Medicine Fellowship. The curriculum includes topic-based modules during which the fellows attend online courses, create and/or update their home institutions’ disaster protocols, create and deliver training to their institution’s staff, conduct disaster drills for their community, produce original research, and participate with local disaster response partners. With each topic-based module, the program’s benefits extend beyond the fellow gaining pertinent knowledge. Intentionally, the curriculum design enables the institution and community where the fellow works to gain staff training, updated disaster protocols, and increased coordination among local response agencies. The two main goals of the SUNY Global Disaster Medicine fellowship are to increase access to a global disaster medical curriculum and to strengthen the emergency preparedness for communities that have fellows in the program. The next steps for this program are creating a formal annual virtual class of ten participants from an academic medical center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The proposal has been signed by leaders from both centers and is scheduled to begin in July 2025. Beyond that, future goals are to expand this program to multiple academic centers globally that do not currently have access to a disaster medical fellowship program.