Fully revised and updated, this fourth edition equips students, advocates, and health professionals with building blocks for a critical understanding of global health.
It explores societal determinants of health and health inequities within and between countries and an array of actions seeking to address these issues in spheres of health and development aid, solidarity cooperation, global and domestic policymaking, and civil society mobilization. Global health has seen an influx of investment and interest over the last two decades, fueling significant gains in areas such as infectious disease and maternal and child health.
As new threats continue to emerge -- pandemics, health impacts of climate change, the growing burdens of an aging population -- it's clear that global health will require fresh thinking and continued investment in order to build on its early successes.
Readings in Global Health is a collection of authoritative review articles on topics in global health excerpted from the New England Journal of Medicine. Authored and edited by leading voices in the field, this volume serves as an ideal introduction to both the state of global health and its road from here.
With extensive illustration, referencing, and supplemental commentaries by editors David J. Hunter and Harvey V. Fineberg, it's an essential guide to the principles and practice of global health and works as a textbook for students taking global health courses as well.
Key concepts, frameworks, examples, and lessons learned in designing and implementing health information and communication technology systems in the developing world.
The widespread usage of mobile phones that bring computational power and data to our fingertips has enabled new models for tracking and battling disease. The developing world in particular has become a proving ground for innovation in eHealth using communication and technology tools in healthcare and mHealth using the affordances of mobile technology in eHealth systems.
In this book, experts from a variety of disciplines—among them computer science, medicine, public health, policy, and business—discuss key concepts, frameworks, examples, and lessons learned in designing and implementing digital health systems in the developing world. The contributors consider such topics as global health disparities and quality of care; aligning eHealth strategies with government policy; the role of monitoring and evaluation in improving care; databases, patient registries, and electronic health records; the lifecycle of a digital health system project; software project management; privacy and security; and evaluating health technology systems.
A global view of health offers a richer understanding of ways of measuring, improving and sustaining health both in individual national settings and in the context of a strongly interconnected world. This book draws on social scientific insights and explanations to examine trends in global health. Moving beyond an epidemiological analysis, the authors use a social determinants framework and life course approaches to offer a critical introduction to the study of global health.
Through individual chapters focusing on topics such as health policy, global governance, health systems and health-related protests, the authors present the scope of global health studies and introduce readers to broader ranging issues such as globalization and political forces. Key themes such as power, inequality and inequity - and their impact on health on a global scale - recur throughout the book.
International examples and case studies are used to illustrate the discussion, which is further supported by opportunities for reflection and further reading.
This book will be an important resource for students studying global health and will have broad relevance to those undertaking health, health-related and allied health professional courses. Barefoot Global Health Diplomacy: Field Experiences in International Relations, Security, and Public Health Epidemics fills real-world gaps in training for those destined to work on health and health systems in challenging, resource-deprived environments.
Key topics include global health programs and individual adaptability for developing country settings, the interface between different actors in the global health diplomacy realm e. This book provides an accessible, practical resource on advanced aspects of global health program design and delivery for global health practitioners and other international staff working on public health initiatives and programs in developing countries.
Offers an innovative, accessible field guide for global health workers in diplomatic aspects of their work Provides helpful insight on how to resolve ethical dilemmas in global health e.
As countries confront new health care challenges in the 21st century, their health care systems reflect the problems and political settlements of an earlier age.
Meeting these new challenges requires reform of existing health care system arrangements while reconciling the goals of equitable access to quality care at an affordable price. This book compares health care reforms in industrialized nations and the Global South to uncover the similarities and differences in their problems and solutions. It examines the struggle over the Affordable Care Act and its alternatives in the United States, major health care reforms in Germany in the new century, and South Africa's efforts to combat AIDS and construct a comprehensive health care system for all.
These particular reforms reflect the underlying configuration of politics in each country. Protecting and promoting health is inherently a political endeavor that requires a sophisticated understanding of the distribution and use of power. Yet while the global nature of health is widely recognized, its political nature is less well understood.
In recent decades, the interdisciplinary field of global health politics has emerged to demonstrate the interconnections of health and core political topics, including foreign and security policy, trade, economics, and development. Today a growing body of scholarship examines how the global health landscape has both shaped and been shaped by political actors and structures. The Oxford Handbook of Global Health Politics provides an authoritative overview and assessment of research on this important and complicated subject.
The volume is motivated by two arguments. First, health is not simply a technical subject, requiring evidence-based solutions to real-world problems, but an arena of political contestation where norms, values, and interests also compete and collide. Second, globalization has fundamentally changed the nature of health politics in terms of the ideas, interests, and institutions involved. The volume comprises more than 30 chapters by leading experts in global health and politics.
Each chaper provides an overview of the state of the art on a given theoretical perspective, major actor, or global health issue. The Handbook offers both an excellent introduction to scholars new to the field and also an invaluable teaching and research resource for experts seeking to understand global health politics and its future directions. The text views global health through a nursing lens, but maintains this awareness and appreciation of interprofessionalism throughout.
The editors and contributors have firsthand experience of the complex dynamics in achieving global health, and bring a wealth of knowledge to this important field, which has grown as a course and specialty.
The text depicts the worldwide expansion of nursing partnerships between resource-rich and resource-limited countries, discusses challenges and obstacles, and provides cases and guidance on how to achieve global health.
It will appeal to all nurses, from student nurses embarking on a global health experience to more experienced global health nurses who offer professional nursing expertise from around the world.
The text responds to a recent WHO mandate, which seeks the input of nurses and midwives as part of an interprofessional team of key strategists for facilitating global health. The Lancet report is also an important document used throughout the text, and an interview with Dr. Julio Frenk, author of that report, is included. Social, political, cultural, economic, and environmental factors—including climate change—are integrated into determinants of global health.
The text covers the foundations of global health, including the emerging concept of climate justice, the ethical context of global health, and the importance of interprofessional education. It addresses key issues of global health with a focus on poor and vulnerable individuals—particularly women and children—and those living in areas of conflict.
As a textbook, the work succeeds admirably. The book grew out of an undergraduate course that has been taught at Harvard University since p. The book is highly readable, written in a clear and accessible style appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students. The many descriptions and stories of actual programs, which serve not only to illustrate particular points being made but also to inspire readers to reimagine the possible, are absorbing and engage readers with the concreteness of global health practice.
All of chapter 6, for instance, is devoted to a descriptive analysis of the work of Partners In Health in Haiti and Rwanda. Throughout, the book also features excellent images, graphs, and interesting asides: black and white photographs add texture to historical descriptions; figures and tables helpfully distill D. Kim complex information for efficient presentation; and numerous standalone biogra- phies of key figures, sketches of noteworthy events, and case briefs function as interesting asides and potential catalysts for student research interests.
However, conceptually, the book seeks to be much more than a text for undergraduate or graduate courses. Given the currently ill-defined and complex reality of global health, the book presents as a new basis for integrating research, training, and service toward the establishment of a distinctive, reimagined field p. The innovation here is not so much in the substance of the approach as it is in the emphasis and scope.
The social dimensions of health are commonly featured in most texts on international and global health see, e. These include the social construction of knowledge and its manifestation in global health practices, the unanticipated consequences of purposive action, Weberian and Foucauldian perspectives on power and authority, and the notions of social suffering and structural violence.
These social theories indeed crop up consistently across various chapters to provide illuminating insights, and clearly hold significant explanatory value. The field envisioned by the editors is more than just a biosocial method, however. But, what is meant by equity?
The moral value of equity is unfortunately taken for granted, effectively leaving readers with a rather vague notion of it. All histories must begin somewhere, and the editors begin in chapter 3 with colonial medicine. The fascinating narrative identifies some legacies of colonialism to which the field remains beholden even today.
These include the development of international health institutions as well as the practice of priority setting, both of which appear to have been dictated too often by the political and economic priorities, first, of colonialists and, in modernity, of donor nations. Chapter 4 closely examines international health in the mids to mids, covering the International Conference on Primary Health Care in Alma Ata, Kazakhstan, the breakdown of its vision in the midst of the sovereign debt crisis of the s, and the subsequent rise of neoliberalism and the program of selective health care provision in a context of perceived scarcity.
If chapter 4 recounted the unfortunate history of a scarcity mindset in international health, the golden age should expand our imaginations about the possible. These histories constitute almost a third of the book; the proportionate length is unusual for introductory texts in global health.
The two together nicely illustrate the interdisci- plinary integration of practice and theory—one informing the other—and an inductive approach that grounds theory in practice. Chapter 6 describes the efforts of Partners In Health, the famous organization co-founded by two of the editors, Paul Farmer and Jim Yong Kim, to strengthen public health systems in Haiti and Rwanda.
There are principles here, the authors argue, that can be used to replicate successful global health delivery efforts in other contexts. Kim et al. There are no arguments or discussions in these chapters at the theoretical level; instead, the emphasis is on presenting the pros and cons of existing frameworks. They then helpfully consider mental health and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis as case studies for a discussion of the politics of disease categorization and the role of DALYs disability-adjusted life years within that economy.
Chapter 9, likewise, eschews theoretical discussions about the validity or adequacy of particular ethical frameworks. The chapter offers only a standard textbook presentation of the strengths and weaknesses of utilitarianism, liberal cosmopolitanism, the capabilities approach, human rights, and a generic category of religious values.
The value of each, it seems, rests primarily in their contributions to motivating commitments to global health equity. The final three chapters of the book take stock of the state of global aid today, health priorities moving forward, and what must be done to realize global health goals.
Chapter 10 charts, again, a moderate course on the question of foreign aid, acknowledging both its dangers and its undeniable positive impacts. Chapter 11 looks forward into the second decade of this century: while affirming the priority of advancing global health equity by building better health systems, in all their biosocial complexities, the authors and editors seek to chart a way forward on various health care priorities that range from neglected tropical diseases to the need to transform primary care in the United States.
On many levels, Reimaging Global Health is an excellent text. It offers a coherent and well-structured vision of a field grounded in equity and guided by a biosocial paradigm of knowledge. That is to say, the book neglects to justify, in any fundamental sense, a reimagined global health field.
The field appears instead as an essentially pragmatic enterprise, driven by the pervasive modern concern with effectiveness. Equity has little content of its own, here, appearing to operate instead as a political consensus appeal that eschews explicit reference to particular religious, philosophical, or moral doctrines and ideas. However, whether a politics of equity is adequate as an enduring foundation for global health, or whether there is a more fundamental ethic on which the field ought to be built, I think, remains an interesting philosophical and theological question for the field.
Theoretical questions might also have been raised about the biosocial approach to which the editors are clearly committed. To be sure, the paradigm usefully renders persons and projects manageable within the purview of the technical tools, funding structures, and knowledge paradigms current to the field.
But by the same token, the term betrays a reductive conception of human being that cannot but fail to hide other important dimensions of human need. Relevant psychological and spiritual dimensions of our experiences of disease and health are thus inevitably ignored. To do so, it seems to me, is to deny a certain truth about our experiences of health and illness. The nature of human persons in response to which and for which the field of global health exists is an important theoretical question that requires further scrutiny.
The book remains, in my opinion, an excellent, well-structured introduction to thoughtful global health practices for undergraduate and graduate students.
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