Training & Education

A core part of HEAL’s mission is the provision of high-quality training and learning opportunities for clinical students and licensed clinicians across multiple health professions and disciplines. 

HEAL supports students and providers who strive to provide the highest standard of care to immigrants and refugees. We believe that this entails thinking holistically about the patient and client experience, employing trauma-informed practices, and developing innovative programming that addresses social, as well as biological, determinants of health. 

HEAL provides training opportunities through various courses and programs, both in person in Baltimore, MD, and nationally through various virtual offerings. 

If you have a potential educational partnership idea for HEAL, please email us at info@healasylum.org.

Below is a list of HEAL’s current training opportunities:

National Training Opportunities

Asylum Medicine Training Initiative (AMTI):

The AMTI was founded in 2021 to train healthcare professionals to meet the need for forensic medical evaluations of people seeking asylum in the U.S. The AMTI team recognized the need to standardize and improve asylum medicine trainings for clinicians hoping to conduct forensic medical evaluations, and worked to develop free, peer-reviewed content that participants can review on their own time from their own location. 

The AMTI Introductory Curriculum is the product of an interdisciplinary collaboration involving 80 contributors with expertise in asylum medicine and human rights law from over 40 organizations and academic centers across the U.S. 

HEAL serves as one of five co-sponsors of AMTI along with Physicians for Human Rights, Society for Asylum Medicine, UCSF, and Cambridge Health Alliance, and HEAL Medical Director Dr. Nick Cuneo serves as one of three AMTI co-leads as well as on the AMTI Steering Committee, and was faculty coordinator for the AMTI module, “Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Asylum: Evaluating LGBTQIA+ Asylum Seekers.” 

The AMTI course is free for health, human rights, and legal professionals. The content is based on the updated Istanbul Protocol 2022 and is suitable for clinicians at all levels of training.

After completing the first five mandatory modules of this course, participants will be qualified to conduct forensic medical evaluations with prominent asylum medicine organizations, including Physicians for Human Rights.

Maryland Training Opportunities

Elective courses:

  • HEAL leaders offer elective courses related to refugee health and asylum medicine at Loyola University of Maryland School of Education (Counseling Survivors of War and Persecution elective course within the School Counseling Program).

  • The Johns Hopkins Global Health Leadership Program “trains future leaders in global health through an exchange of cultural, clinical, and educational knowledge and skills.” HEAL serves as a practice site for the GHLP’s domestic migrant health and human rights advanced elective.

Practicum site:

  • HEAL is a clinical rotation site for the General Preventive Medicine Residency program at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, a two-year continuing education program for physicians who want to obtain further “clinical knowledge and skills essential to leadership roles in the design, management, and evaluation of population-based approaches to health.”  

  • AWE is the primary site for the Refugee Health Partnership program within the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (read more about the RHP model and program structure here). In this program, medical student members of the Refugee Health Partnership student group work collaboratively to provide additional health navigation support to especially medically vulnerable AWE clients over the course of a year. 

  • The HEAL Forensic Evaluation Clinic includes trainees from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Loyola University of Maryland, who shadow forensic evaluations and assist evaluators in preparing legal affidavits which document observations and evidence from the evaluation. 

    • This experience not only exposes students to experiences of immigrant and refugee survivors of torture and trauma, but also allows them to observe and practice trauma-informed interviewing and cross-cultural care.

Undergraduate student opportunity:

  • The HEAL Forensic Evaluation Clinic hosts volunteers working with the Hopkins Community Connection undergraduate student group, who conduct social determinants of health assessments for clients of the clinic, in order to connect these clients to needed community services as possible.