This blog has posted on the "business of delivering global health service" before which featured the new version of MIT Sloan’s flagship international course The Global Entrepreneurship Lab. This 44 minute video MIT World » : Projects for Change: Bringing Management Tools and Ideas, Collaboration, and Learning-by-Doing to the Challenge of Global Health Delivery provides more important insights for leaders and management being taught at MIT by Anjali Sastry.
Sastry endorses David Kolb’s “learning loop” model: concrete experience, observation and reflection, forming abstract concepts, then further implementing and analyzing. She ponders if this cycle can transcend classroom learning to engender change in the world. Her own research and consulting in health care delivery are based on such a stepped method. She stresses that an integrated, holistic perspective is also required. For instance, a malnourished patient will be unable to absorb drugs administered for AIDS; medicine is insufficient without food. As to the larger picture, she says “obviously we’ve got to tackle global warming and carbon emissions, but we also need to tackle poverty.”
It is a basic premise of this blog that getting the funding from the world governments is at best only a first step and perhaps not the most important step. It was a quote by Sastry from the video that brought home its connection with the Millennium Development Goals and global health.In the arena of global health, we know that we have the methods to improve healthcare for everybody on this planet. We know that we could reduce the death rate and substantial improve health care with the tools and medicines that we already have. Yet it's not happening. And don't say that there is not enough money. Maybe we need more but there is a boatload of money going into global health.
praxis: Anjali Sastry's Blog Optimism is her starting point.
