An Emerging Voice tours Europe

Graduate life at Syracuse does not really give one much time to breathe or blog so the last month was a welcome change. I was selected to be an 'Emerging Voices' through an essay competition organized by the Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM) and got to spend two weeks with them in Antwerp, Belgium attending a workshop on building our research publication and presentation capacities and presenting my essay at the ITM Colloquium. My topic was on language barriers in healthcare settings in India, something I had started writing about on this blog quite a while ago. ITM also organised for us to go to the First Global Symposium on Health Systems Research in Montreux, Switzerland. I was selected to be one of the three Emerging Voices to present our views of the symposium at the closing plenary. We spent hours trying to collate feedback, develop a critique and fit it all into a six minute Pecha Kucha style presentation. The effort paid off when we received the only standing ovation of the symposium the next day, a moment now immortalized on YouTube.

As usual my camera travelled with me although I did not use it much during the actual workshop and symposium days. Most of the shots are from our walks around Antwerp and Sunday trips to Amsterdam and Rochers de Naye.

More Health For All blogs

It is heartening to see that there are now a few more blogs written by people from the Health For All movement in India. Their blogs are slowly beginning to collectively represent the different issues and arenas that health activists work in, from the challenging ground reality of providing health care in rural India to the often esoteric world of health policy.

fieldnotes by Dr. Ramani Atkuri talks about the realities of practicing medicine and doing community health work at Jan Swasthya Sahyog, a unique hospital and community health project in Chhattisgarh.

Stories on Poverty and Rural Health in India documents an attempt by Dr. Johnathan Fine, an American physician and human rights activist to probe into the structural issues that surround poverty and ill-health during his visit to Jan Swasthya Sahyog, Chhattisgarh.

dip tinking is a personal blog by Dr. Dhruv Mankad, a doctor and health activist who has done a lot of work on training community health workers.

Right To Health Care is a blog by Dr. Ravi Duggal, who has worked extensively in the area of health financing in India.

However, conspicuous by their absence are blogs by younger Indian health activists, a group who you would assume would be more comfortable with online media.  It is difficult to hypothesize why this is so. Is it that the younger generation has nothing to say or is it that they are still struggling to find the language and context within which they can express themselves?

MFC meet at Sevagram

Thanks to my recently accquired Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XSi I have been a happy shutterbug this month. Check out my debut photos from the annual meet of the Medico Friend Circle in Sevagram.

The Medico Friend Circle (MFC) is a group started in the 1970s that has functioned as a sort of 'intellectual critique central' of the health movement in India. Meetings are held twice a year with all members sitting on the floor in a community circle. The content can be frustratingly impractical to the new comer at times, with hardly any actionable points coming out of two days of deliberations. However old-timers will point out that this is exactly what gives MFC its appeal. It is a place where activists and health professionals who spend the rest of the year working with the practical realities of health in India can indulge in two days of networking and free for all intellectual debate on their projects and ideas. Everyone goes home the richer.

Come together, right now

I have just finished attending a workshop by the International People's Health University on 'Health and Equity', where for nine days we concentrated on understanding the growing difference between the health of the rich and poor, the economic and political forces that are causing this and the social movements that have arisen as a response to this. Most participants had years of experience working for health at the grassroots level and their shared stories contributed to making it the workshop a rich experience grounded in practical realities.

The course helped us link what many of us witness as local phenomena to the much more distant economic and political arena. This can be a discomforting connection at times once you realise that as an individual you are quite powerless against such distant, undemocratic institutions such as large corporations and international bodies. This was the point in the course where the answer to such an essentially political problem emerged.

In an era when economic and political decisions made by big businessmen and our politicians have a large influence on both our individual health as well as the health of the communities we belong to, the only protection against bad, corrupt decisions is community organisation. If communities come together from the street to the global level in order to monitor the decisions our leaders make, only then we can protect ourselves from the decisions that are detrimental to our health and lives.

What do I mean by community organising? This video says it much better than I ever could.

Lousy T design idea

Understanding Health For All

There seems to be so much confusion regarding terminology within People's Health Movement. We hear talk of 'upper-case People's Health Movement' and 'lower-case people's health movement'. 'Health For All' seems to be the buzz word used by everybody today, from private insurance companies and corporate hospitals to Right to Health lobbyists and community health workers.

Here is Dr. Halfdan Mahler, the grand old man of the Health For All movement breaking it down in the simplest of terms. According to him the concept of Health For All is a value system/ spiritual belief. It requires a leap of faith. You have to believe that everyone is entitled to try and live in perfect health. You have to believe that any attempt to take away this freedom is wrong. Then you act.

Taking it from there, People's Health Movement is then the largest network of Health For All believers. It is the most visible face of such a belief. Using new technologies such as the internet and cheap air travel it unites individuals, organisations and networks to work towards Health For All at all levels. Its core manifesto is the People's Charter for Health, an action plan to achieve the world it believes in.

So People Health Movement is not a movement after all. It is the biggest network within the Health For All movement. If it was called the Network Of People Believing In Health For All And Then Deciding To Do Something About It then half the confusion would be cleared away. But there is no denying that PHM rolls of the tongue more easily than NOPBIHFAATDTOSAI.

If you dont believe that everybody, I mean everybody, has the right to try and live a life in perfect health then you cant use 'Health For All' in its profound, genuine sense. In the world we live in everyone suffers from some curtailment of this freedom. The poor, the sick suffer more. However such curtailment can never be morally right. While forcing people to live in unhealthy environments, preventing their access to the best possible medical care, allowing them to be subject to humiliation and hate may sometimes be temporarily unavoidable it can never be morally condoned.

An individual or institution who then uses the 'Health For All' term to promote itself but condones even the temporary infringement on people's Right to Health is then merely 'HFA washing' or 'hfasing'. Similar to pink washing, the phenomenon of corporate houses using breast cancer awareness and charity as an excuse to market their products. See Think Before You Pink for more.

To sum it up. The idealistic concept of Health For All finds practical expression in the lives of thousands of individuals and institutions who constitute the Health For All movement. The largest network of such believers is the People's Health Movement. However there seems to be others who use the 'Health For All' term carelessly and sometimes for selfish purposes.