Throughout the first half of my
internship with Partners In Health, I have had the amazing opportunity to speak
with and learn from some amazing people. Re-reading chapters 13-16 reminded me
of some of the wisdom they imparted, and I wanted to share it with you all
here.
The first lesson is that those
interested in “global” health can sometimes forget that the United States is
part of that global community, and that there are very real and difficult
problems regarding access to care within our own nation. For instance, the book
points out that “in Boston’s Mission Hill neighborhood, right next to the
Brigham [and incidentally close to where I am living this summer], for
instance, infant mortality is higher than in Cuba.” Boston’s PACT program works
with clinics in Boston and the US to strengthen a model of accompaniment and
care provision for the sick and vulnerable.
We must not forget about the poor
and the sick in our own community, even if poverty is often “relative” in the
United States. People occasionally look at communities with absolute poverty around
the world and comment that those people are much worse off than people who are
relatively poor in the US. The Executive Director of the Equal Justice
Initiative and PIH Board Member, Brian Stevenson, challenged the PIH interns to
think of how hard it must be to be poor in the wealthiest nation in the world.
Absolute poverty is of course devastating and an enormous issue. But too often,
I believe, people (myself included) often look past the suffering in our own
communities.
At a meeting today with PIH’s
Boston based program, the Prevention and Access to Care and Treatment (PACT)
program, we discussed some barriers to care within Boston, a city where nearly
everyone has health insurance and that is home to some of the best medical
facilities in the world (Massachusetts General Hospital, the Brigham and Women’s
Hospital, etc.). Some of these barriers to care include poverty, homelessness,
racism, abuse, language and literacy. The PACT program uses Community Health
Workers to empower their patients and accompany them to care. As GlobeMedders,
we must remember that our global health community includes the United States and as Paul Farmer would say, "the only real nation is humanity." When we say health is a human right we mean that health is a human right for
everyone, everywhere, and we must take the necessary steps to make this belief a reality by learning about the different issues and advocating for the poor, the sick and the vulnerable both in the US and abroad.
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