Reasoning Without Resources

Jerry Paccione’s first experience in global health was between his 3rd and 4th years in medical school when, for a year, he was the sole medico practicante for 3 remote villages in Guatemala. Since then he has integrated global health practice and training into his education career at Montefiore Hospital and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx.  As Director of the Primary Care/Social Medicine Program at Montefiore between 1985-2007, he initiated special clinics for immigrants in the South Bronx and victims of international Human Rights abuses, and created experiences for residents and students in Latin America, the Navajo reservation in Arizona, and Africa that linked medical education with meaningful clinical service. Since 2006, as director of global health in Montefiore’s department of Medicine, Dr. Paccione has coordinated a collaboration between Kisoro District Hospital, U.S. medical schools, and the NGO, Doctors for Global Health, that has treated tens of thousands of patients in an underserved rural area of Uganda while providing real-world training for more than 350 medical students and residents. With a strong community foundation, the program has also trained and actively maintains Village Health Workers in 52 Kisoro villages, and with them, sponsors novel projects in in a wide range of community-based services including chronic disease diagnosis and management, and geriatrics.   

Dr. Paccione has served on the boards of directors of the Global Health Education Consortium (GHEC), Doctors of the World and Doctors for Global Health. A professor of Medicine at Einstein and Montefiore, he has received numerous teaching awards, including Einstein’s Lifetime Achievement Award in Medical Education.

Dr. Joseph “Sepp” Stephens is an Internal Medicine physician and member of the Global Health and Clinical Skills Faculty at Montefiore—clinician educators working and teaching in both the Bronx, New York and Kisoro, Uganda. While a medical student, Sepp was awarded a Senior Global Health Fellowship to work in Kisoro, Uganda, where he collaborated with local NGO employees to strengthen the existing village health worker (VHW) project serving a population of 100,000. He helped to update and coordinate new VHW training and improved the functionality of the district hospital and community-based chronic disease clinics. He also streamlined the production of household “health reports” that inform targeted interventions by VHWs. He completed his residency in Primary Care and Social Internal Medicine at Montefiore Hospital. His research has focused on hypertension in rural Uganda, from household level universal screening to community and hospital-based management.

Dr. Kristen Welch completed her Internal Medicine Residency and Chief Residency at Case Western Reserve University SOM before coming to work as an Internal Medicine physician at Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Montefiore Medical Center. She teaches medical students as well as residents from the Primary Care and Social Medicine Residency program. She spends three months of the year in Kisoro, Uganda caring for patients and teaching

Dr. Gloria Fung Chaw completed medical school at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and internal medicine residency at Columbia University Medical Center. After residency, she joined the NGO Partners in Health and Harvard Medical School, as a clinician educator in a rural district hospital in Rwanda, where she worked with local doctors and nurses on the inpatient wards, the non-communicable disease clinic, and the women's health department. She returned to Einstein/Montefiore in 2013, where she is faculty in the Primary Care Social Internal Medicine residency program and a primary care doctor at the Comprehensive Health Care Center in the South Bronx. She serves as the Associate Director of the Uganda Global Health program at Einstein-Montefiore. In her current role as a Global Health faculty, she is involved in teaching global health and clinical skills in New York and supervising medical students and residents during their field elective in Kisoro, Uganda. She has collaborated with Doctors for Global Health and Kisoro District Hospital since 2008, building and strengthening numerous community health initiatives, including the Kisoro Village Health Worker Program and the Chronic Care Clinic.

Ken Schaefle is a graduate of Northwestern University and a founder of the Boom Chicago Theater Company in Amsterdam, Netherlands, where he lived for over a decade. He graduated from the Columbia University Post Bacc-Pre Med program and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he went to Kisoro, Uganda in 2013 and was awarded the Albert Kuperman Global Health award in 2014. He completed residency at Lenox Hill where he was Chief Resident of the HIV track. He joined Montefiore in 2017 as a primary care physician at the Comprehensive Health Care Center and, as one of our Global Health Faculty members, supports residency education and patient care in Kisoro, Uganda. He is editor of the two-volume global health textbook Reasoning Without Resources due for release in 2021. He is passionate about equality in health outcomes and using technology for communication and education.