Brzoska Patrick, Akgün Seval, Antia Bassey E, Thankappan K R, Nayar Kesavan Rajasekharan, Razum Oliver
Epidemiology Unit, Faculty of Behavioral and Social Sciences, Institute of Sociology, Chemnitz University of Technology, Chemnitz, Germany; Department of Epidemiology and International Public Health, School of Public Health, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany.
Department of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, Başkent University , Ankara , Turkey.
Front Public Health. 2017 Mar 9;5:36. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2017.00036. eCollection 2017.
Teaching in the field of public health needs to employ a global perspective to account for the fact that public health problems and solutions have global determinants and implications as well. International university partnerships can promote such a perspective through the strengthening of cooperation, exchange, and communication between academic institutions across national boundaries. As an example for such an academic network in the field of public health, we introduce the International Public Health Partnership-a collaboration between a university in Germany and universities in India, Turkey, and Nigeria. Formed in 2005, it facilitated the exchange of information, fostered discussion about the transferability of public health concepts, contributed to the structural development of the universities involved, and promoted an intercultural dialog through a combination of local and distance learning activities. Although well accepted by students and staff, different obstacles were encountered; these included limited external funding, scarce own financial, time and personnel resources, and diverging regulations and structures of degree programs at the partnership sites. In the present article, we share several lessons that we learned during our joint collaboration and provide recommendations for other universities that are involved in partnerships with institutions of higher education or are interested to initiate such collaborations.
公共卫生领域的教学需要采用全球视角，以考虑到公共卫生问题及解决方案具有全球决定因素和影响这一事实。国际大学伙伴关系可以通过加强跨国界学术机构之间的合作、交流和沟通来促进这种视角。作为公共卫生领域此类学术网络的一个例子，我们介绍国际公共卫生伙伴关系——德国一所大学与印度、土耳其和尼日利亚的大学之间的合作。该伙伴关系于2005年成立，促进了信息交流，推动了关于公共卫生概念可转移性的讨论，为相关大学的结构发展做出了贡献，并通过结合本地和远程学习活动促进了跨文化对话。尽管受到学生和教职员工的广泛认可，但也遇到了不同的障碍；这些障碍包括外部资金有限、自身财政、时间和人力资源稀缺，以及伙伴关系所在地学位课程的规定和结构存在差异。在本文中，我们分享了在联合合作过程中吸取的一些经验教训，并为其他与高等教育机构建立伙伴关系或有意发起此类合作的大学提供建议。
