Global Health Industry

4 Key excerpts on "Global Health Industry"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Essentials of Global Health

  • Babulal Sethia, Parveen Kumar, Babulal Sethia, Parveen Kumar(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Elsevier

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 1.3 .

  Global health

  Some commonly used definitions of global health include:

  • ▪ ‘Health issues where the determinants circumvent, undermine or are oblivious to the territorial boundaries of states, and are thus beyond the capacity of individual countries to address through domestic institutions. Global health is focused on people across the whole planet rather than the concerns of particular nations. Global health recognises that health is determined by problems, issues and concerns that transcend national boundaries’ (HM Government, 2008).
  • ▪ ‘An area for study, research, and practice that places a priority on improving health and achieving health equity for all people worldwide’ (Koplan et al., 2009 ).
  • ▪ ‘Health problems, issues, and concerns that transcend national boundaries, may be influenced by circumstances or experiences in other countries, and are best addressed by cooperative actions and solutions’ (US Institute of Medicine, 1997).

  Global health is an interdisciplinary field which encompasses disciplines such as law, economics, history, social and behavioural sciences, engineering, biomedical and environmental sciences and public policy.

  Why is global health relevant?

  International clinical placements

  Global health is relevant because many health care professionals train and practice both in their country of origin and in foreign lands.

  The globalised world

  Each year, around 3 billion airline passengers fly within and across borders. Infectious disease epidemics/pandemics and mass migration are all major issues requiring a globalised approach to health policy and leadership. The Internet and the increasing connectivity of individuals across the globe in the 21st century provides a reminder of the importance of being a ‘global citizen’, and improving the health of everyone in the global, interconnected village.

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  eBook - ePub

  Routledge Handbook on the Politics of Global Health

  • Richard Parker, Jonathan García, Richard Parker, Jonathan García(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  These factors, in turn, have been associated with sharply divergent visions not only about the causes of global health problems, but about how best to respond to global health challenges. Whether to emphasise primary health care and to build health systems from the ground up, or to opt instead for vertical health programmes and more technical or technological solutions to disease control, are the kinds of questions that have divided approaches to global health for decades. But as we have moved more fully into an era of global health since the late-1990s, such debates have increasingly been linked to deeply divided visions of the values and perspectives that should underlie global health policies, ranging from an emphasis on cost effectiveness and resource constraints on one extreme, to new calls for health and human rights, and renewed calls for health and social justice on the other. The appropriate roles for states and intergovernmental agencies, for private enterprise, for civil society – ranging from grassroots activists, community-based organisations and non-governmental groups to private philanthropy, foundations and private–public partnerships – have all been hotly debated. Existing international trade regimes and intellectual property rights have increasingly come to be understood as deeply implicated in relation to global health responses, and the politics of research, development, and innovation have come to be seen as directly relevant to equitable access to essential medicines. Perhaps most important, all such issues have come to be hotly debated in the early twenty-first century in forums as sharply opposed as those of the World Economic Forum and the World Social Forum, making global health one of the most highly politicised fields in contemporary public debate, and underlining the stakes involved in opting for different visions of the ‘Global Health Industry’ that has taken shape in recent decades.

  Nearly two decades have passed now since the field of global health began to announce itself, roughly at the turn of the century in 2000, as a fundamentally new approach, or even paradigm, as opposed to earlier approaches known as international health or, before that, tropical medicine. But as this time has passed, much of the optimism that initially greeted this supposed paradigm shift has unfortunately proven to be somewhat exaggerated. Many observers hoped that the idea of a truly ‘global’ system would be taken seriously, and we would better understand the health issues both in the global North and the global South as profoundly interrelated and mutually implicated. In reality, we have found that the ‘global’ has often been little more than a new label for what was previously the primary focus of both tropical medicine and international health: the health challenges of the so-called developing world, found primarily in poor countries largely located in the global South. This failure to fully transform our understanding of the spatial and social dimensions of global health has also been accompanied by an even greater failure to transform the fundamental power relations that have long operated in earlier approaches: the inequities between North and South that have so consistently produced and reproduced relations of colonialism and imperialism in ways that have established the global North as the centre of power, development assistance, scientific expertise, decision-making, and general domination in relation to global health policies and programmes. While global health problems have continued to be seen as somehow ‘out there’ in the distant global South, solutions all too often are supposedly invented in the global North and exported to the locations where they are perceived to be needed, with all-too-little involvement of those supposedly in need in terms of participating as anything even remotely resembling equal partners in the decision-making process.

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  eBook - ePub

  An Introduction to Social Policy

  • Peter Dwyer, Sandra Shaw, Peter Dwyer, Sandra Shaw(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  13 Global Social Policy: Globalized Health Policy Sandra Shaw

  Overview

  • Globalization is a process that has been occurring over a long period of time, but which has intensified in the 20th century, and is associated with the development of a global capitalist economy.
  • Globalization is seen as having positive and negative consequences, with a potential for creating and deepening inequalities.
  • Global social policy opens up new opportunities for developing social policies that transcend national boundaries and new areas of study for social policy students.
  • Global governance refers to the way that influence on policy making can be diverse, including a range of ‘actors’ such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), international governmental organizations (IGOs), governments, multinational corporations (MNCs), voluntary sector organizations and pressure groups.
  • Health policy provides a good example of the complexity of global social policy that highlights a range of global issues and the evolving responses to them.

  Introduction

  Studying social policy today entails looking outside of the national state, and developing an awareness of what is happening in this broader global context, and how this impacts on social policy. Yeates argues that global social policy:

  has broadened and invigorated the study of social policy itself and has undergone substantial developments itself, bringing in a new range of concerns and a new set of theoretical, conceptual and methodological approaches to understanding social policy and welfare provision. (2008a: 14–15)

  This chapter starts by providing a brief discussion of globalization, before moving on to consider global governance – the way that social policies are influenced at the global level. The chapter focuses on health policy as it provides an interesting illustration of how a range of different actors can exert influence on health policy at the global level, and the role of some of these organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), is outlined. A key aspect of global health policy has been prevention of the spread of infectious diseases. However, the chapter also recognizes that the global health agenda is complex, continuously evolving and extends across all areas of life which impact on the health and well-being of individuals, nations, regions and the world.

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  eBook - ePub

  Shaping Global Health Policy

  Global Social Policy Actors and Ideas about Health Care Systems

  • Alexandra Kaasch(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  1 Global Social Policy Actors and Health Care System Ideas

  1.1   Introduction

  Health is a significant global issue, and has become even more so in the past few decades owing to manifold globalisation processes. People all over the world struggle with similar health constraints. The search for curative and eradicative means to cure diseases is usually considered a common and global human challenge. Infectious diseases threaten people in a world of extensive worldwide cross-border exchanges. The dramatic social risks of the inability to work for health reasons affect the lives of people, without regard for age, social status or their place of residence. At the same time, the increasing transnationalisation of family structures and individual work and employment histories poses significant challenges to national and supranational health care provision and financing.

  An important institution to tackle such challenges is the health care system (also referred to as “health system”).1 While commonly set up at national policy levels, health care systems as concepts or strategies also form a central element of global social policy agendas and debates. They are considered important for the achievement of global health goals (such as the health-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the post-2015 goals (so-called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)), and they provide a key element of various other social development and global health strategies; for example, when it concerns the fight against specific diseases. In a speech to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly meeting on the Prevention and Control of Non-Communicable Diseases (2011), UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stated:

  Improving health systems improves health services. Involving all parts of government attacks all sides of a problem. And taking comprehensive action is the best way to protect against diseases.

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