Global health care at a crossroads
The pivotal role of family doctors in providing health care to populations around the world has preoccupied the past few years of Professor Michael Kidd’s life.
Professor Michael Kidd with Dr E Osagie Ehanire, Minister of Health in Nigeria, during a recent visit by Professor Kidd to Africa as WONCA global president.
As the Executive Dean of the Flinders School of Medicine nears the end of an expansive three-year term as president of the World Organization of Family Doctors (WONCA), he will present a free public lecture on Wednesday, October 19 at Flinders University Victoria Square.
The weighty subject – How do we ensure everybody in the world gets access to health care? – centres on the belief that universal health care is not attainable unless a nation has a strong system of community-based primary health care delivery.
Professor Kidd insists general practitioners are “true heroes” of health care globally, and often the only doctors providing medical care in rural areas outside cities in many countries.
“Out of more than seven billion people on the planet, the World Health Organisation estimates that one billion have little or no access to health care services,” he says in the new Flinders University 50th anniversary publication The Investigator Transformed.
“With the adoption of the new Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations, we have an opportunity to change that by strengthening primary health care with the aim of achieving universal health coverage.”
In the United Nations’ new Sustainable Development Goals, released in September 2015, there is only one specific health goal, to “ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages”, even though attaining each of the 17 new goals relies on healthy people in healthy communities.
“This renewed global focus on universal health coverage provides an unprecedented opportunity to reform global health care and the role of primary health care,” Professor Kidd says.
The WONCA does its fair share, representing more than 600,000 family doctors in more than 160 countries and the interests of more than two billion patients.
Professor Kidd believes there is a great need to promote the importance of people-centred health care and to strengthen primary health care and multidisciplinary team approaches to community-based health care delivery in each country of the world.
At the Flinders Investigators Lecture, Professor Kidd will provide his global perspective on why strengthening primary health care is the most viable way to close the treatment gap and ensure all people in all communities get access to the health care they need.
UNIVERSAL HEALTH RESEARCH:
Global health and universal health care: how do we ensure everybody in the world gets access to health care?
Wednesday, October 19, 5.30-6.45pm
Flinders University, 182 Victoria Square, Lecture Theatre 1 (Level 1)
Register online: www.flinders.edu.au/flindersinvestigators
An extensive collection of profiles on Flinders University leaders, students, graduates, researchers, academics and supporters can be viewed online at the website here.
The souvenir picture book, The Investigator Transformed, can be purchased via the Flinders 50th anniversary website.
