The formation of Bolivian physicians by the Cuban Medical Brigade in Cochabamba, Bolivia

Abstract

In two moments of 2012, more than 1 600 students of the New Program of Physicians Formation of the Latin-American Medicine School were graduated in Bolivia, 360 of them in the department of Cochabamba. The physicians of the Cuban Medical Brigade combined teaching work with the health care one and played a decisive role in the studies culmination of the students that, coming from different Cuban universities, accomplished the necessary objectives to carry health care to the poorest places of the country. They had the unconditional support of the Family Parents Association and the Bolivian Movement of Solidarity with Cuba. There are not written memoires of the work carried out for the termination of these students studies. This motivated the authors, who worked in the Teaching Coordination of that Department, to describe the educative teaching process developed in the conditions of an international mission from their personal point of view. 41 official documents were consulted, and 16 of them were used for this task. We searched in the Databases Medline Complete and Medline with full text of Ebsco, Pubmed, and regional Scielo, using the descriptors New Program of Latin-American Physicians Formation (Nuevo Programa de Formación de Médicos Latinoamericanos, in Spanish), Latin-American School of Medicine (Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina, in Spanish), Bolivian students (estudiantes bolivianos, in Spanish), Cuban Medical Brigade (Brigada Médica Cubana, in Spanish), internationalism (internacionalismo, in Spanish) and medical teaching (docencia médica, in Spanish). We found 45 original works. The authors chose 13 of them as the most representative ones and the ones with higher quality, which also were published in the last 5 years.