Health Equity: 08/12/11

Friday, August 12, 2011

[EQ] Education of Health Professionals for the 21st Century

Health professionals for a new century:
Transforming education to strengthen health systems in an interdependent world

A Global Independent Commission The Lancet 2010

Available online PDF [116p.] at: http://t.co/ka3fWz6

“……….One hundred years ago, a series of studies about the education of health professionals, led by the 1910 Flexner report, sparked groundbreaking reforms. Through integration of modern science into the curricula at university-based schools, the reforms equipped health professionals with the knowledge that contributed to the doubling of life span during the 20th century. By the beginning of the 21st century, however, all is not well.

Glaring gaps and inequities in health persist both within and between countries, underscoring our collective failure to share the dramatic health advances equitably. At the same time, fresh health challenges loom.

New infectious, environmental, and behavioural risks, at a time of rapid demographic and epidemiological transitions, threaten health security of all. Health systems worldwide are struggling to keep up, as they become more complex and costly, placing additional demands on health workers.

Professional education has not kept pace with these challenges, largely because of fragmented, outdated, and static curricula that produce ill-equipped graduates.

The problems are systemic mismatch of competencies to patient and population needs; poor teamwork; persistent gender stratification of professional status; narrow technical focus without broader contextual understanding; episodic encounters rather than continuous care; predominant hospital orientation at the expense of primary care; quantitative and qualitative imbalances in the professional labour market; and weak leadership to improve health-system performance. Laudable efforts to address these deficiencies have mostly floundered, partly because of the so-called tribalism of the professions—ie, the tendency of the various professions to act in isolation from or even in competition with each other.

Redesign of professional health education is necessary and timely, in view of the opportunities for mutual learning and joint solutions offered by global interdependence due to acceleration of flows of knowledge, technologies, and financing across borders, and the migration of both professionals and patients…”

…. Frenk J, Chen L, et al. Health professionals for a new century: transforming education to strengthen health systems in an interdependent world.
Published online (DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(10)61854-5) on Nov 29, and in The Lancet Dec 4, 2010, vol 376; pp 1923–58) was published initially in The Lancet in November 2010.
It is being reproduced in expanded book form by the Commission in full recognition of the copyrights of The Lancet. Distributed by Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA…

Twitter http://twitter.com/eqpaho

* * *
This message from the Pan American Health Organization, PAHO/WHO, is part of an effort to disseminate
information Related to: Equity; Health inequality; Socioeconomic inequality in health; Socioeconomic
health differentials; Gender; Violence; Poverty; Health Economics; Health Legislation; Ethnicity; Ethics;
Information Technology - Virtual libraries; Research & Science issues. [DD/ KMC Area]
Washington DC USA

“Materials provided in this electronic list are provided "as is". Unless expressly stated otherwise, the findings
and interpretations included in the Materials are those of the authors and not necessarily of The Pan American
Health Organization PAHO/WHO or its country members”.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PAHO/WHO Website
Equity List - Archives - Join/remove: http://listserv.paho.org/Archives/equidad.html
Twitter http://twitter.com/eqpaho

IMPORTANT: This transmission is for use by the intended
recipient and it may contain privileged, proprietary or
confidential information. If you are not the intended
recipient or a person responsible for delivering this
transmission to the intended recipient, you may not
disclose, copy or distribute this transmission or take
any action in reliance on it. If you received this transmission
in error, please dispose of and delete this transmission.

Thank you.

[EQ] Urban Sustainability in Latin America and the Caribbean

Urban Sustainability in Latin America and the Caribbean

Inter-American Development Bank IADB/BID, 2011

Available online at: http://bit.ly/qMmbks

“…………Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) has the highest rate of urbanization in the developing world. The proportion of the region’s population living in cities almost doubled between 1950 (41%) and 2010 (80%).

Likewise, economic activity in the region is significantly concentrated in its cities. Between 60% and 70% of the regional gross domestic product (GDP) is currently produced in urban areas. Despite this generation of wealth, two out of every three people in Latin American and Caribbean cities live in poverty. These circumstances, together with the growing importance of cities’ impact on the environment and the high vulnerability of Latin American and Caribbean cities to climate change, natural disasters, and financial limitations, create a need for reflection on the concepts of sustainability and urban development in LAC.

Cities are more than the sum of their sectors; on the contrary, they are complex and interdependent systems on whose dynamics the quality of life of millions of

people and a good part of the regional economy depend. Environmental, economic, and social imbalances in cities can create formidable barriers to sustainable development. Understanding how cities really function is fundamental to resolving these imbalances.

In response, this work presents a comprehensive analysis of urban sustainability in Latin America and the Caribbean. The document is composed of six sections, including this introduction. Providing the theoretical and empirical elements of the analysis, the following section briefly reviews the relationship between urbanization and economic development at the international and regional levels. The third section delineates the evolution of the concept of sustainability in the urban sphere in recent years.

The fourth section discusses the principal problems that currently affect the sustainability of Latin American and Caribbean cities, and the fifth section provides the foundations of a methodological proposal for approaching the comprehensive study of the sustainability of Latin American and Caribbean cities, including their components, the interactions of those components, and the horizontal and vertical integration of the analysis process. The work culminates in some final reflections in the last section…..”

Content:

I. Introduction

II. Urbanization and Economic Development

III. Sustainability of Urban Development

IV. Urban Challenges in LAC

Disaster Risk and Climate Change

Comprehensive Urban Development

Fiscal Management, Governability, and Transparency 33

V. Toward a Concept of Urban Sustainability Applicable to LAC

The Experience of the IDB

Elements for Evaluating and Planning Sustainable

Urban Development

Focus on Intermediate-Sized Cities

VI. Final Comments

References

Twitter http://twitter.com/eqpaho

[EQ] Linkages between researchers and legislators in developing countries

Linkages between researchers and legislators in developing countries

A scoping study Working Paper 332 - July 2011

Ajoy Datta and Nicola Jones

Overseas Development Institute ODI

Available online PDF [27p.] at: http://bit.ly/pMYg7m

“…………….The need for legislative information and research, especially in developing and transition countries, is growing as policy-making processes become more complex, particularly in the context of globalisation, regional integration and decentralisation.

Since the executive branch of governments generally has access to a larger pool of knowledge and expertise than the national legislature, there is a need to address the imbalance in access to knowledge between the executive, legislature and judiciary in order to promote better quality policy-making.

Better access to information and research can help empower legislatures to formulate and pass effective legislation and perform effective scrutiny of government. Using the Research and Policy in Development (RAPID) framework, this study maps the links between researchers and legislators in a number of transition and developing countries; explores the role of politics in influencing researcher–legislator linkages; and comments on the type of research produced as well as the credibility of the research/researchers…”

“…………In Argentina, Chile, Korea, Peru and Taiwan, legislators access research through party-affiliated think-tanks. In Korea, publicly funded political parties must spend 30% of their budget on research legislators in their work. Further, researchers are often asked to provide advisory services to party officials and to contribute to policy development or give seminars at party retreats and conferences. Knowledge producers have collaborated with one another in their interactions with the legislature. There are also examples where different types of actors (such as scholars and activists) have come together to put pressure on the legislature. Moreover, legislators and (civil society) researchers have worked together to put pressure on the executive.

In several contexts, especially those in Latin America and East Asia, legislative staff, i.e. those attached to legislators or committees/commissions, play a key intermediary role between research, researchers and legislators. Specialist organisations also exist to translate complex knowledge into accessible research products for legislators and to link them to key researchers. Finally, although formal links between researchers and legislators are growing, informal linkages between research staff and legislators………….”

Contents

Executive summary

1. Introduction

2. Legislator–research links: a framework

3. Legislator–researcher linkages

3.1 Formal linkages

3.2 Informal mechanisms

4. Some political factors

4.1 The power of the executive

4.2 Legislative rules and structures

4.3 Political competition

4.4 External influences

4.5 Summary

5. The nature of evidence

5.1 Type and adequacy of evidence

5.2 Credibility of research

6. Summary and key lessons

References

Appendix

Twitter http://twitter.com/eqpaho