"Harvard Offers New Global Health Program"
-Today's New York Times (5.14.12): a fascinating article on the scale and scope of rural health care delivery in Rwanda; "...the country provides health care and insurance to more than 90% of its population, inspiring medical leaders from across the globe to visit the African country to study its transformation."
The new program at Harvard, which analyzes public health through this local context, "...is one of the first that focuses exclusively on the challenge of delivering health care. It encourages students to think about politics, economics, and other social factors effect health....
Thus, putting great minds together, both in Rwanda and in the academic world, to highlight local innovations, local solutions, and the causation to these local realities. My question, of course, is why is this not being done in education, and how can we implement this same mode of thought into educational development?
Resource scarce environments demand a delicate level of social understanding and analysis/diagnosis into service delivery blockages in basic education, just as health services; however, in education, quality and efficiency is taken as a given; enrollment rates, instead of educational outcomes, the yardstick. What would the analysis reveal if health centers were judged on their intake of patients, alone, and no attention was paid to mortality rates or levels of care they were receiving once in the clinic? This is exactly what is occurring with most of the world's educational systems. And this is the mindset that needs to be changed, through innovative, diagnostic, local projects such as this new Global Health Program.
-Today's New York Times (5.14.12): a fascinating article on the scale and scope of rural health care delivery in Rwanda; "...the country provides health care and insurance to more than 90% of its population, inspiring medical leaders from across the globe to visit the African country to study its transformation."
The new program at Harvard, which analyzes public health through this local context, "...is one of the first that focuses exclusively on the challenge of delivering health care. It encourages students to think about politics, economics, and other social factors effect health....
Thus, putting great minds together, both in Rwanda and in the academic world, to highlight local innovations, local solutions, and the causation to these local realities. My question, of course, is why is this not being done in education, and how can we implement this same mode of thought into educational development?
Resource scarce environments demand a delicate level of social understanding and analysis/diagnosis into service delivery blockages in basic education, just as health services; however, in education, quality and efficiency is taken as a given; enrollment rates, instead of educational outcomes, the yardstick. What would the analysis reveal if health centers were judged on their intake of patients, alone, and no attention was paid to mortality rates or levels of care they were receiving once in the clinic? This is exactly what is occurring with most of the world's educational systems. And this is the mindset that needs to be changed, through innovative, diagnostic, local projects such as this new Global Health Program.
