TAMPA - Inside a nondescript conference room at Tampa General Hospital on Dec. 7, the face of global health was changing.
Sixteen physicians from the cities of Lanzhou and Guigang, China, surrounded by American snacks and coffee mugs bearing the University of South Florida Health logo, took notes from a PowerPoint slideshow about leadership written in Chinese and English.
Dr. John Sinnott, chairman of USF Internal Medicine, paused between sentences to allow a translator to speak.
"Your hospital should be constantly measuring infections in hospital rooms and always improving," he said. "Do you understand?"
The presentation was one of many given throughout the year by Sinnott's Leadership Enhancement and Development program, or LEAD, which partners Tampa General with USF Health to bring the knowledge of senior American hospital administrators to medical centers in developing countries like China, Thailand and Panama.
"Chinese hospitals do not have CEOs with master's degrees, so as physicians they really don't have access to leadership skills," said Dr. Lynette Menezes, USF Health International's assistant vice president and assistant dean of USF Medicine International.
"Many of the doctors who have come here and trained with us are now leading their hospitals as vice presidents or department chairs."
The LEAD program was created in 2000, when Sinnott and Menezes traveled to India to train more than 150 physicians to better manage the HIV epidemic that was sweeping the country at that time, bringing some of the doctors back to the U.S. to learn prevention and treatment strategies.
In 2009, doctors from the city of Lanzhou, which had embarked on a project to expand its medical infrastructure, visited Tampa General and liked what they saw enough to sign an official agreement.
One year later, the first group of hospital administrators arrived in Tampa to learn how to run their new centers.
Over the last four years, Lanzhou has built nine 2,000-bed hospitals, and the LEAD program has brought prestige in global medicine to both Tampa General and USF Health.
USF President Judy Genshaft has accompanied Sinnott on several trips. Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn went on one of 2016's trips to help establish an official sister-city relationship between Lanzhou and Tampa.
"Diseases don't know borders anymore," Sinnott said. "My doctors here need to know what's happening, for example, in India, and Indian doctors need to know what's happening here. And these doctors go home and talk about what a wonderful hospital Tampa General is."
Sinnott estimated that the visiting doctors' hotel stays, which they pay for in addition to their income-based tuition for the program, accounts for about 9,000 nights into Tampa's economy.
The doctors now visiting stay at the new West Wing Boutique Hotel on Fowler Avenue, where they like to swim after a long day of learning and enjoy shopping and dinner on their own at local restaurants. One of them is Hong Kong House, which they said has "awesome" food.
"Tampa is a very beautiful city, near the sea," said Dr. Nan Wang, a cardiologist who has been to the United States once before to study at Emory University in Atlanta. "The weather is very comfortable!"
Menezes said that about 50 percent of the doctors who participate in LEAD are women, and most are between the ages of 30 and 40 - demonstrating a gradual shift to a new generation of hospital leaders.
"I know the U.S. is getting better at this, because we see a lot more females in our medical schools," she said. "But I feel from my visits to China that there is a lot more gender equality when it comes to women in leadership roles."
Sinnott said he uses "a fair amount" of his own money for program expenses, and Menezes spends her evenings and weekends making the dozens of phone calls required to keep a global health initiative running. The physicians don't earn extra pay for running the LEAD program.
"One of the most satisfying things to me is to do something for someone with no expectation that you would ever be paid back for it," said Sinnott. "You're just doing it for altruistic reasons, and that is really why people go into medicine."
Contact Libby Baldwin at lbaldwin@tampabay.com. Follow her at @LibBaldwin