Wednesday, November 24, 2004

News from Everywhere - Another Perspective

My friend Bev pointed me to News from Everywhere, produced by Rhys Evans. Evans believes that having multiple perspectives on issues is a good thing... especially in education. This week he wrote about the "The 'know-do' gap."
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has said this week that academic research into cures for diseases which affect millions of people world-wide is not enough to make them work in practice. It claims that time and money is spent on work in laboratories, discovering new drugs, inventing new machines and tests, at the cost of finding ways in which this vitally important new knowledge can be brought to the people who need it.

73 billion dollars are spent every year on health and medical research, and 95% of that goes on laboratories, research and the people carrying it out. Much more needs to be spent on the sick people themselves, on developing public health policies in the countries concerned and on putting them into practice. As things are, the enormous progress that has been made in medicine in recent years has quite often not reached the areas where they are most needed. There is what is called a 'know-do' gap, a gap between what people know (knowledge) and what they actually do (action).

Good public health systems mean hospitals which are well equipped and function efficiently; having enough doctors and medical staff; making health care affordable to the people. There has to be good information and communication, so that the health of the whole population can be monitored; good training, and money to pay salaries to the health professionals involved. This aspect of medical research, says the WHO, not only is less well funded but for young students is seen as less glamorous than academic work. Systems need to be researched to help governments target more money at strengthening their health care practice. In Tanzania, for example, malaria caused 30% of deaths amongst children in 1996-7. As a result, more money was then spent on ways of preventing malaria, such as making sure children slept under mosquito nets, and child deaths from malaria dropped by 40% in the following years. How do you think that the know-do gap can be closed, and the millennium target of achieving better health for all can be reached?

[Source: Inter Press Service]"
I wonder if he'd ever consider doing this as a blog. I'd add it to my newsreader in a flash.

OK, time to stop blogging and time to go get my teeth cleaned. Which do you think I'd rather be doing?

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