When Healthcare Hurts

Empowerment or Disempowerment? There are three paths to take when designing and implementing global health initiatives. One leads to the community, one leads to the health system, and the last leads to the community through the local health system. Working at the community level is more complex, and it should be considered only by programs that are experienced in doing so or in partnership with programs that have that experience. Unfortunately, this is where most short-term programs choose to partner, and this leads to many challenges. Working in and through local health systems is the best way to eliminate most of these challenges. Working at the health-system and hospital level eliminates most of the patient-safety issues associated with short-term health initiatives. It also pairs programs that understand each other together. Thinking about community-level global health initiatives is often completely foreign to most western medical programs. We term these community-based programs “horizontal,” because they arise from the community for the community. Hospital systems are programs that are vertical in nature, and western medical thinking is typically very vertical. We will look at the idea of both vertical and horizontal models in this chapter so that you can clearly identify the best fit for your global health initiatives. It is essential that we realize that using strictly vertical approaches to healthcare delivery in resource-poor communities can be more harmful than helpful. This is especially true if those projects are separated from local healthcare professionals and their services. In many cultures, everything western is better, sought after, and to be imitated, while old ways of tradition and caring should be left behind and abandoned. Alma Ata, which we will discuss later in this chapter, gave rise to the idea of horizontal community-based programs. That thinking has matured into sustainable models of healthcare and disease prevention. If your program plans to function outside hospitals in the community, then you need to invest time in learning how to design and implement horizontal community-based programs. If we do not learn, respect, and implement these methods, we may be destined to leave a legacy of disempowerment and dependence on methods of healthcare that have proven ineffective in resource-poor communities. The opposite side to this is that if we do learn these methods, there is no limit to the effect the enormous volume of short-term volunteer teams could have on child mortality, maternal mortality, HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other communicable diseases. As healthcare providers trained in developed countries, we need to let go of the idea that our methods of healthcare are the only methods. There are methods short-term teams can use to serve and support such projects; we review some of these methods in this chapter.