The New Medical Frontier - International Frontier

Osher at Dartmouth's Summer Lecture Series: The New Medical Frontier The group Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres) strives to provide healthcare to populations facing emergencies like military conflict, natural disasters, and epidemics, or to marginalized people. While the problems we face in trying to meet health needs in these settings are vastly different in many ways from those facing the U.S. health care systems, there are common themes between the two, such as the need for fiscal oversight, accountability to populations served, and prioritization of services to be funded. In this presentation the experiences of a surgeon who worked for nearly a decade with MSF will be contrasted to the care provided in the U.S. health care system. John Lawrence, M.D. • FACS, FAAP, Staff Pediatric Surgeon - Maimonides Medical Center Dr. John Lawrence, a native of Illinois, currently serves as Vice President on the Board of Directors for MSF (Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders) - USA. Dr. Lawrence attended Dartmouth College and Dartmouth Medical School, then completed a family practice internship and worked as a general medical officer in Tuba City, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. He then returned to residency and completed training in general surgery at the University of Rochester, in Rochester, New York, and then pediatric surgery at St. Christopher’s Hospital in Philadelphia. For the past 20 years, he has been a practicing pediatric surgeon primarily in academic settings, and he is currently a staff pediatric surgeon at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY. Owing in part to a longstanding interest in global health, Lawrence has completed eight surgical missions with MSF since 2009 and has recently begun coursework for an MPH degree through the Bloomberg School of Public Health at John’s Hopkins University. Dr. Lawrence has served MSF as a surgeon in the Central African Republic, Cote D’Ivoire, Haiti, Syria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. $25 at the door. For more information, vist: http://osher.dartmouth.edu/summer_series/