The BMJ has chosen Orbis for this year’s Christmas charity appeal. Orbis has been working in Vietnam since 1996, and over the past 20 years has helped to establish five paediatric ophthalmology centres and rural paediatric eye health services; helped develop Vietnam’s first national eye bank; and funded the first wet lab in Vietnam, in […]
Category: Global health
Matthew Harris: Is this Brazil’s healthcare “Brexit” moment?
I spoke at the Pan-American Health Organization symposium in Brasilia on the 11 November to senior officials from the Ministry of Health. The symposium was to guide and shape the Ministry of Health’s next National Primary Care Strategy, but there was talk of a real threat to the primary care system being dismantled, slowly and insidiously. […]
Students are the key to addressing the gap between academia and action in global health
The last decade has seen an unprecedented growth in the number of students from England, the United States, and other high-income countries involved in global health and development projects in emerging economies around the world. The barriers that traditionally created significant separation between the classroom and the field in global health and development, such as […]
Daniel Whitney: Mental health has still not achieved “parity of esteem”—even among some medical professionals
It’s late morning; little piles of lists and notes from assessments carried out in the past 24 hours are littered between me and the PC. The assorted paraphernalia that seems to accumulate around me after a night on-call clutters my surroundings: a dictaphone, the British National Formulary, Maudsley guidelines, and the semi-completed audit I glance at […]
Tiago Villanueva: Primary care in Brazil’s largest favela
Walking through Rio de Janeiro’s largest slum, Favela da Rocinha, in the pouring rain is probably not the wisest thing for a foreign visitor to do. But on a recent trip to Rio, I was determined not to squander the one chance I had to visit the Maria do Socorro Silva e Souza Family Health Clinic—one of […]
Aser García Rada: Living in limbo in Greece’s refugee camps
From late March to late August I worked in two Greek camps for refugees as part of a joint Spanish-French Red Cross deployment to support the Hellenic Red Cross. Providing care to people, many of whom were originally middle class, in the developed but wobbling Greece carried with it certain peculiarities. I began and finished in Ritsona, […]
Chris Simms: Path dependency—Trump, Brexit, and the future Europe
Barbara Tuchman begins her seminal work The March of Folly by observing that a “phenomenon noticeable through history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.” The phenomenon seems relevant to the election of Donald Trump, the Brexit vote, and perhaps to upcoming European national elections that […]
Planning a network for randomised trials in global surgery
Surgery has been called the “neglected stepchild” of global health. Of the surgical research that is done, virtually none of it is relevant to patients and surgeons in resource limited settings. GlobalSurg is a collaborative of surgeons and methodologists who are developing pragmatic, patient facing research focused on low and middle income countries (LMICs). Since […]
Richard Smith: Working to make cholera a disease of the past
Until last year the Cholera Hospital in Dhaka, Bangladesh, could have a thousand admissions a day before and after the monsoon. On a calm day now it still has hundreds. Not all the patients, many of them children, have cholera but many do. Many of the children also have malnutrition, sometimes severe. In order to […]
Dot Sang: This is what success in the Calais camp looks like
The Calais Jungle is now all but rubble and mud. More than 10,000 refugees who inhabited the camp are dispersed across France. Many of them will be embarking on their new journey to claim asylum and start a new life in France, whilst some will have to face the bitter reality of returning to where […]