| Patrick Watt: Health is a right, wherever you are |
[Nov. 23rd, 2009|10:52 am] |
First of all, it’s really encouraging to see so many people posting entries on this blog – including the Secretary of State for International Development, and his Conservative and Liberal Democrat counterparts.
We need to see more of this kind of debate, not least in the countries that are furthest off track on reaching the fourth Millennium Development Goal, and where child mortality often gets scant political attention.
However, it would be worrying if the debate got stuck in the rut of ‘aid: good or bad?’ Ultimately this misses the point because – as our Child Health Now report makes clear – the fundamental issue is that the interventions that make the biggest difference are currently being neglected.
Unless we rebalance investment in child health, so that family and community care and prevention are given much greater priority, we simply will not meet the health goals, regardless of who is funding them.
Community health workers running health education programmes, skilled birth attendance, immunisation, clean water and safe sanitation, hand-washing with soap, proper nutrition for children and mothers, bed nets to prevent malaria: none of this is especially glamorous, but it’s proven and relatively low-cost.
The current approach to global health is dominated by single-disease initiatives and a narrow approach to strengthening formal health systems. These are urgent issues, but they’re only a part of the picture. We need to start matching our efforts more closely to where the problem really lies. To paraphrase Bill Clinton, ‘it’s the prevention, stupid’.
In this context, DFID’s commitment to spend £6 billion on health up to 2015 is welcome, but we now need a serious debate about how to balance that spending so that it makes the maximum contribution to achieving MDG 4.
Of course aid isn’t going to deliver the health goals, but I agree with Toby Ord that it can spur progress where it’s given in the right way and is complementing national efforts. Equally, there’s lots that the not-for-profit and for-profit private sector can and should do to contribute. The challenge is bigger than any one institution.
In the final analysis, however, health is a right, and where states are failing to realise that right, they need to be held to account and pressed to act. That’s where our campaign comes in. Over the next five years, we’ll be working in countries around the world to get governments to take their responsibility seriously, and act end the scandalous loss of 9 million lives each year. |
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| Comments: |
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/88281199/19817402) | From: ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=91.7) goldenmug
2010-03-20 10:49 pm (UTC)
At home with the UK children | (Link)
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You say,
"Community health workers running health education programmes, skilled birth attendance, immunisation, clean water and safe sanitation, hand-washing with soap, proper nutrition for children and mothers, bed nets to prevent malaria: none of this is especially glamorous, but it’s proven and relatively low-cost."
Leave aside malaria nets, and you could put this lot on a list for all children in the UK and not get it. Midwives, hygiene, proper nutrition - until we reckon those matter here, how is anyone going to support them elsewhere?
I'm not saying that children in the UK are more important, just that you can tell what people think could be important for other people's children by what they demand for their own.
| From: goldenmug
2010-03-20 10:56 pm (UTC)
Health not a right | (Link)
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You say, "In the final analysis, however, health is a right."
Rubbish. Some of the conditions that protect health are a right - clean water I would rank amongst them, whenever it is possible to get it. So, perhaps, not having amoebic dysentery might, just maybe, be a right.
Not getting smallpox should be classed as a human achievement, not a right.
Not having cancer is an aspiration, and one doomed to fail for 1 in 4 of us.
A land where no one is sick or unhealthy, because they have a "right" to health is cloud cuckoo land.
The biggest question is - who will pay for health service?
pimples are really annoying, you can kill them using benzoyl peroxide but it will also make your skin red.
Great post! I want to see a follow up to this topic
Super-Duper site! I am loving it!! Will come back again â taking your RSS feeds also, Thanks.
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