Oct 2, 2008
Posted by Caitlin Cohen
I just attended the Network: Towards Unity for
Health conference in Bogota, Colombia. There
are 340 participants from 45 different
countries, all of whom are trying to tackle
primary health care and health education.
Discussions include brain-drain, medical school
educations, and how to promote pro-poor
healthcare policies.
I was invited to
present a workshop entitled “Using Health to
Build Power” about using community organizing
strategies for health. The diversity of
participants was incredible… I learned about
medical education in Mozambique and at Harvard,
anti Gender-based violence campaigns in Egypt,
and clinical outreach in Nepal. It was a
pleasure to share our model and see how it is
applicable to projects around the world.
One of the most amazing parts of the
experience was the site-visit. I spent a
day at each of two healthcare programs in slum
communities south of Bogota. The slums
here are nothing like in Mali: one of them,
Ciudad Bolivar, has close to 2 million
residents and is a strong hold for the FARC
rebel movement as most of the residents there
are displaced by drug crime and war. In
the emergency ward of one hospital, every
single trauma case was violence-related.
This was contrasted to the Hospital Pablo VI,
which works with 550,000 disenfranchised people
in a slum called Bosa. This hospital is
not really a hospital: They have sixteen
very small health access points, two referral
points, and HUNDREDS of sustainable community
projects such as day-cares, counseling,
“mothers in action”, latrines, river
cleanliness projects, traditional healers
associations, etc. The best part of it
is: all of their projects are locally-run and
all of them try to link the government directly
with the community. Furthermore, they are
entirely government funded, and do not receive
any more funding than any other public hospital
group in Bogota. In short, they are doing
amazing things with very little.
It was
inspirational to see that a program with a
model similar to ours can be successful, even
in a slum that is plagued by violence. It
gives me hope that we can share our model and
have an impact far beyond our community.
