Daniel Palazuelos, MD, MPH, is an affiliate of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine Program in Global Primary Care and Social Change and a tutor in the required HMS I course, Introduction to Social Medicine and Global Health. Dr. Palazuelos is a global health implementor-educator who holds positions at Harvard Medical School, the Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), and Partners In Health (PIH). These include: clinical work as an attending on the BWH wards for 10 weeks a year with the hospitalist service; management support for, and mentorship of, the Global Health Equity (GHE) residents at the BWH; clinical and research mentorship in the PIH projects in Mexico and Guatemala; accompaniment of community health worker (CHW) projects across all PIH sites through a quality improvement (QI) task force that hosts summits, authors papers, represents PIH at national and international meetings, and awards internal QI micro-grants. For years, he worked to create the strategy for, and successfully launch, the new health care system strengthening PIH project in Mexico, Compañeros en Salud-Mexico. It is envisioned not only as a service provider for local people in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Chiapas, but also as a platform for both U.S. and Mexican medical trainees to learn about global health and to conduct implementation research. In addition to an emphasis on extensive preparation and on-site mentorship, this program offers collaborators the capacity to support intensive and logistically complex research efforts. Noteworthy examples include: a stepped-wedge unidirectional crossover study of the effectiveness of CHW accompaniment on diabetes and hypertension treatment adherence and clinical outcomes, and a user perception study of how a multifaceted educational intervention has affected local staff career choices.
Denise Octavia Smith, MBA, CHW, PN is founding executive director, National Association of Community Health Workers.
