When Jodie Pritchard arrived in Cambodia a few years ago to teach a first-aid course, the plan was simple: classroom, PowerPoint, structured training.
Then she saw the classroom.
There wasn’t one.
Instead, there was a field. No electricity. Chickens walked right through. And cows kept an eye on everything.
So, the plan changed, and Pritchard and her colleagues swapped the lecture for hands-on scenarios and made it work.
Adapt is just what you have to do in emergency medicine, says Pritchard. And not only in an international setting like this one, but everywhere.
“You just can’t be that rigid person who says, ‘We always do things exactly this way,’ because it never goes that way,” she says with a smile.
It’s one of the big lessons learned in , a two-year program led by Emergency Medicine Professor Dr. Susan Bartels. The fellowship brings some of the top early-career physicians to Queen’s for training in emergency disaster response, humanitarian aid, international research, and emergency medical systems.
When Pritchard was a fellow in 2019 and 2020, GEM was the only fellowship of its kind in Canada. There’s only one other now, at the University of Toronto.
At Queen’s, it’s a flexible program that can be tailored to what you want, says Pritchard, who spent more than a decade as a paramedic before becoming a physician.
She was interested in medical education and global health, and she combined the two in fellowship coursework and time in the field that took her from an emergency room in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to refugee camps in northern Uganda.
In Peru, where she was taking a tropical medicine course, she caught one of the last flights out before the country closed its borders at the start of the pandemic.
Dr. Jodie Pritchard at a refugee camp in northern Uganda in 2019.
“The whole fellowship just had tons of learning, support, great mentorship,” says Pritchard. “I had worked internationally before, but these were all new opportunities.”
Pritchard says a lot of those opportunities reinforced how much humanitarian emergency medicine has changed. The old model of “running in and doing something and then leaving” has been replaced with one that’s more about partnership, capacity building, and supporting what communities actually want, she says.
For her, that usually starts by spending the first few days in a new place watching how things work, asking questions, and understanding why a system operates as it does.
“You have to be observant and quiet and kind of blend into the background for a while,” says Pritchard.
It’s an approach that now shapes her work far beyond the fellowship.
In the spring, she spent six weeks at a field hospital in southern Gaza, and she continues to explore new opportunities further afield.
That same focus on health equity drives her work in Canada too. Among several roles, she’s now an ER doctor in Kingston and a transport medicine physician with Ornge. She has also worked with the emergency department in Moose Factory, Ontario.
“You definitely don’t have to go overseas to use your advocacy skills,” she says.
At Queen’s, where she’s an associate professor, she’s also now using those skills to train the next generation of emergency medicine physicians.
And whenever she gets a chance to catch up with fellow GEM alumni – and current fellows looking for support – she jumps.
“The fellowship is such a great opportunity to try different things, challenge yourself, and understand what you like, what you don’t, and what you’re good at,” she says.
Stories like Dr. Jodie Pritchard’s show how teaching, research, and mentorship in emergency medicine can shape care well beyond campus. You can help strengthen that work at Queen’s by supporting the which helps advance teaching, research, and equipment needs.
