Introduction: Short-term medical missions (STMMs) are international service trips of short duration and typically involve teams traveling to provide medical service to low- and middle-income countries. The phenomenon of STMMs is neither well understood nor well defined in the literature. To date, the only published reviews of STMMs focus exclusively on the academic literature. However, these reviews do not capture the characteristics of medical missions conducted by visiting medical teams (VMTs) with no impetus to publish. YouTube, a video sharing platform which launched in 2005, is a novel information source for studying health-related issues. The goal of the present study is to understand the scope of STMMs. Specifically, we aim to characterize the STMMs described in publications listed in PubMed and videos posted to YouTube. We aim to subsequently compare findings from the literature and video review. Methods: We followed PRISMA guidelines to conduct a two pronged search of PubMed-indexed articles and videos posted to YouTube. We created a data extraction form to collect information about short-term medical mission characteristics, including sending and recipient country, sending organization, size of VMT, duration of medical mission, student involvement, and links to the local health system. Additional YouTube video-specific information was extracted including number of views, perspective, quality, operating location of the team, and distribution of medicines and vitamins. The free-text observations of the videos were thematically analyzed. Results: The majority of STMMs described in both PubMed (72%) and YouTube (93%) originate from the USA. The countries receiving the highest number of STMMs identified through literature publications were Haiti, Guatemala, Ethiopia and Peru; among videos, the countries with the highest number of STMMs were Philippines, Haiti, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic. Analysis based on income grouping shows the majority of missions go to lower-middle income countries. Analysis of recipient country based on health workforce density shows that most STMMs go to countries with a health workforce shortage, but this relationship is not linear. The majority of STMMs described in the literature (46%) were organized by secular non-profit organizations whereas the majority of STMMs described in the videos (45%) were organized by faith-based organizations. Out of 49% of articles that specified size, the median was eight members. In comparison, out of 33% videos that specified size, the median was 19 members. Whereas the median size of STMM reported in the literature was 9.5 days, the median duration in videos was 7 days. Student involvement was mentioned in 39% of articles and 18% videos. The majority (87.3%) of articles described a link to the local health system, whereas only 49.8% of videos described any link to the local health system. The median number of views of the videos was 315. Almost all videos (98.6%) were taken from the perspective of the VMT, and 82.2% were of amateur quality (non-professional). Although patients’ faces were shown in 96.1% of videos, only 0.7% of these videos stated that patient consent was obtained. Among the videos that specified the operating location of the STMM, 52.2% took place in a local healthcare facility, 21.5% in a school classroom, and 20.5% in a church. Over half (59%) of the videos portrayed the distribution of medications or vitamins. Of the videos that specified the type of service provided, 80% described STMMs that delivered medical (non-surgical) services. The provision of dental (36%), surgical (29%), and optometric (18%) services was also commonly described. Themes that emerged from the videos included patient privacy issues and long wait times. Discussion/Conclusion: The identified recipient countries of STMMs, when analyzed by income grouping and health workforce density, suggest inadequate distribution of STMMs. Furthermore, the videos highlight aspects of STMMs that have not been clearly explored in the literature including patient privacy, long wait times, and the distribution of medications and vitamins. Additionally, we found considerable variation between STMMs described in the academic literature and in grey data sources, specifically with respect to recipient country, sending organization, size of VMT, duration of STMM, and student involvement. Thus, we recommend caution in using only the academic literature to characterize the scope of medical missions. Future programmatic and policy directions should include improved pre-departure VMT training, rigorous evaluation of STMMs and the creation of a global registry.

Thesis (M. A.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1997. / Bibliography: leaves 182-188.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2001. / Bibliography: leaves 451-468.

No description available.

This thesis is a contribution to a hitherto neglected area of research: The African Pentecostal Churches, that do not belong to those called African Indigenous Churches (AICs). It is a case study from the perspective of southern Burundi, the periphery of the ancient kingdom. The Pentecostal Movement in Burundi was born in the encounter between Swedish Pentecostal missionaries and the population in the southern part of the country. This study highlights what happened in that encounter. The thesis consists of six parts. The first is a survey of the Pentecostal Movement in Sweden. The diachronic structure of parts two to five focuses on the development within the Burundian Pentecostal Churches and their relationship to the Burundian society 1935-1960. In the sixth part the diachronic approach is augmented by structural analyses, showing how aspects in the Pentecostal Movement developed. The Pentecostal missionaries accepted in part the traditional world view, the belief in a spiritual world and non-rational explanations to misfortunes in life. They encouraged the Burundians to do spiritual experiences, and especially the baptism in the Holy Ghost. The Burundian evangelists and church elders played a decisive role. It was their task to reformulate the Pentecostal message in Kirundi, which was not spoken by the missionaries. They moulded the message into a Burundian Pentecostal message, at the same time respecting the teaching of the early missionaries. They succeeded in doing that so well that the Pentecostal Movement became a popular movement, in certain places the dominating Christian denomination, in spite of the parallel work done by the Catholic Church, encouraged and supported by the Belgian state. This thesis builds on material taken mainly from unpublished sources from archives in Burundi, Sweden, Rome, Great Britain and Denmark. These are supplemented by interviews, most of them made by the author.

The study addresses from a sociocultural-historical, in particular a missiological and medical perspective the question if Catholic hospitals in Matabeleland, affected by the dramatic down-turn of Zimbabwe’s economy since 2000, did whatever they could to continue offering quality services to their patients. It starts with a portrayal of the emergence of secular modernity in the North-Atlantic World, as regards its view of the world as solely governed by natural laws, and of people as capable of taking destiny into their own hands, unperturbed by spiritual forces. The question is explored how the Christian Occident could end up there, following its development through the Middle Ages, and its expansion by missionary activity, by preaching the Word, but also by military force. Next, the achievements of pre-1900 Western medicine are examined, to identify if/how missionaries in Africa could have benefited. The study describes how professional medicine did not become part of the early Zambesi Mission, not because of its curative shortcomings, but for spiritual reasons, insofar as the Jesuits did not follow the European trend to let worldly well-being take the place of eternal salvation. Vis-à-vis their other-than-modern view of life, suffering, and (self-)sacrifice, the promises of medicine appeared just trivial. Submissiveness to authority, both ecclesiastical and worldly, is identified as the core principle that informed the Jesuits’ educational approach towards Africans in all their efforts at conversions. The missionaries thereby colluded with colonialist thinking, in not attempting to make their pupils grow into self-confident, independent thinkers in their own right. In this educational tradition, grafted onto a pre-modern local culture, the study finds the reason why Zimbabwean medical staff, as managers of their clinics or hospitals, have shown little readiness to proactively prioritise the intrinsic needs of their institutions and push for corrective measures, prepared even to challenge their superiors when encountering aberrations in the health system, locally as well as higher up. The study asks if the Church could have opted for a different educational approach, considering the prevailing socio-economic and cultural framework conditions; finally, which options present-day Zimbabweans have to choose from, regarding their country’s future development. / Christian Spirituality, Church History and Missiology / D. Th. (Missiology)