Seminar to launch Global Health Watch report in the Netherlands
The newly published Global Health Watch 2 will be launched in the Netherlands at a seminar entitled 'Health for All in a new global context: challenges and opportunities', at Radboud University, Nijmegen, at 6.00 pm on 25 November. Global Health Watch 2 is the second report published by the People’s Health Movement, Medact, and the Global Equity Gauge Alliance, as a civil society alternative to the World Health Organisation’s annual World Health Report.
Speakers at the seminar will include Development Cooperation Minister Bert Koenders, Professor Ronald Labonte of the University of Ottawa, and representatives of the World Health Organisation and the People’s Health Movement.
Former Development Minister Professor Jan Pronk says of GHW2: 'GHW2 is insightful and provocative…. It is a true developmental report. The facts presented are a reason for great concern. They call for action.'
The seminar puts GHW2 into context as the culmination of three major reports on global health over the last three months. Together, these reports represent a renewed assertiveness of the health community on the global stage. They indicate the emergence of a shared agenda between civil society, the academic community and international officials in health, as discussions begin on global economic reform.
In August, the Commission on Social Determinants of Health, established by the World Health Organisation, launched its report, Closing the Gap in a Generation. Based on comprehensive analyses of the available evidence from nine global networks of leading experts in relevant fields, it finds that the vast gaps between the health of the rich and the poor are “the result of a toxic combination of poor social policies and programmes, unfair economic arrangements, and bad politics”, both nationally and globally.
In October, the World Health Organisation published its own World Health Report 2008, sub-titled Primary Health Care – Now More than Ever. It reasserts the principles of Health for All and primary health care, first articulated by WHO in the Alma Ata Declaration of 1978. These have since been largely eclipsed by health sector “reform” programmes driven by free market principles and selective approaches to health-care, which have been promoted by the World Bank since 1980.
Global Health Watch 2 builds on both these reports, as well as the first Global Health Watch (published in 2005). The product of an extraordinary collaboration involving 131 individuals and 76 institutions in academia and civil society around the world, GHW2 adds a global civil society voice to the chorus of WHO and the CSDH in highlighting the fundamental changes that are needed to achieve real improvements in health and health equity.
See the Global Health Watch website for more infornation. You can also download the report from this website.
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