Extract

Disparities in travel health education across health professional programmes may impact the quality of patient care. Travel health experts suggest that clinicians providing travel health services often struggle to provide informed guidance because they are inadequately trained.1 Indeed, this conclusion is supported by previous studies describing large proportions of physicians without specialized travel health training (~40%) providing travel health services and recommending medications and vaccines inconsistent with guidelines more frequently than trained pharmacists.2,3 A solution proposed by Flaherty et al. is, ‘to introduce all undergraduate healthcare students to travel medicine, since the majority of medical graduates subsequently train to become general practitioners or family physicians and there is hardly a medical or surgical specialty to which travel health issues are not relevant’.4 Here, we call for the development of a standardized set of travel health competencies to optimize travel health instruction across health educational programmes in order to improve patient quality of care.

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