GHEM Fellowship Program

The Global Health Emergency Medicine (GHEM) Fellowship program helps emergency medicine clinicians develop the appropriate skills, knowledge and experiences, to become leaders in the Global Health arena. Through this process, our fellows are able to develop and implement educational, programmatic and research initiatives, benefitting vulnerable populations around the globe.

This fellowship is one of its kind and one of the firsts in Canada. We select one to two fellows per year, and each fellow can choose a curated curriculum which includes 1/3 field work, 1/3 education and research, and 1/3 clinical work.

Fellows can choose to complete this fellowship in 1 or 2 years, based on prior experiences and educational achievements. Fellows can choose to amalgamate their global health focus with one of the following sub-fields of interest: Systems Development, POCUS, Trauma, Disaster/Humanitarian Relief, Innovations, Research, Pre-Hospital Care and Emergency Medicine Training. We have established partnerships with TAAAC, MSF and HHI. Our fellowship is housed at the Emergency Department at University Health Network in Toronto, Canada.

We will be hosting a GHEM Q&A session with our 2022-2023 Fellow Dr. Matt Douglas-Vail, and Fellowship Directors Drs. Hiren Patel and Alex Stefan. Please RSVP here and a Zoom link will be shared before the session.

2023-2024 Fellows

Dr. Sara Alavian

Dr. Sara Alavian is an emergency medicine resident at McMaster University. Her academic interests include health equity, global health, and capacity-building in low-resource settings. On a national level, she served on the CAEP Anti-racism and Anti-Colonialism Committee developing guidelines for anti-racism and anti-colonialism in the emergency department and received the CAEP Resident Leadership Award in 2022. At McMaster, she has focused on developing clinical resources for interacting with patients who are incarcerated and standardizing care for sickle cell patients in the ED. Her interest in global health involves knowledge translation and capacity-building in low-resource settings for delivery of excellent emergency medicine care.

Dr. Arjun Sithamparapillai

Dr. Arjun Sithamparapillai is completing his emergency medicine residency at the University of Toronto as a Global Health Emergency Medicine (GHEM) Fellow. After an MSc in Global Health and working with GHEM/TAAAC-EM as a medical student, he is excited to return full circle as a fellow. He remains passionate about medical education and academia as a means of building EM capacity, having won CAEP’s top resident abstract in 2022 and being nominated for teaching awards locally. He is eager to gain further clinical experience in lower-resourced settings this year while fostering his passion for social determinants, teaching, and mentorship through several avenues.

Past Fellow

2022-2023

Dr. Matt Douglas-Vail

Matt was the inaugural GHEM Fellow during his PGY5 residency year in emergency medicine at the University of British Columbia. He was and continues to be involved in projects in Ethiopia, Liberia and Northern British Columbia centered around point-of-care-ultrasound in resource limited settings as well as climate change and its effect on vulnerable populations. Now that he has completed his fellowship, Matt is working as a staff physician at Vancouver General Hospital and BC Children’s Hospital. At Vancouver General Hospital he will also supervise and lead Canada’s first social emergency medicine elective.

Fellowship Co-Directors

Hiren Patel

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Hiren Patel, MD, MPH, is an emergency medicine physician at University Health Network. He is an assistant professor at University of Toronto, Global Health Fellowship Co-Director and practices clinically at Toronto General and Toronto Western Hospital. He completed his Masters in Public Health at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. Before joining the University Health Network team, he was the Director of Global Health Fellowship and the Senior Advisor for the Division of Global Health and Human Rights at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School. His global health focus is on international emergency medicine education and development, relief management and sustainable systems building as well as bridging the private and public sectors in this arena. Some of his work includes emergency medicine pre-hospital systems development in Ghana, emergency first aid response management in South Africa, emergency medicine education, training and systems building in Kenya, emergency disaster response and trauma stabilization in Iraq, as well as numerous other global health and humanitarian work. He is on various International Emergency Medicine boards, is a reviewer for three International Emergency Medicine journals, is the co-editor for GEM EM Cases and has had several publications focusing on emergency care capacity building in low resource settings. In addition, he is also the Co-Medical Director of MyTown Health, a conglomerate of urgent care practices in Massachusetts and is the program director of BostonMD, a concierge travel medicine organization.

Alexandra Stefan

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Dr. Alexandra Stefan is an emergency physician at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and University Health Network. She is assistant professor in the Division of Emergency Medicine at the University of Toronto. She completed her Masters of Science in Health Professions Education at the University of Toronto. She is currently the Global Health Fellowship Co-Director, as well as the Wellness and EDI Co-Lead for the Emergency Physician group at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. Her non-clinical interests are in medical education (in particular, simulation) and physician wellness. She has a longstanding involvement in the Toronto Addis Ababa Academic Collaboration both as a delegate as well as in administrative roles.

Application Materials

Interested in the GHEM Fellowship?

Applications for the 2024/2025 are now open and due November 17, 2023.

The full application can be found here.

If you have any questions, please contact GHEM Program Manager Hannah Girdler (hgirdler@ghem.ca) to learn more.