Week 9 - Health & Well Being

What is the Global Health Policy?

  • WHO founded 1948 to develop new ideas around health at the highest level📊

  • Since 1980s WB to develop welfare states and support medical finance

  • Other key players are UN, WTO and OCED due to transporting medication as well as ensuring distribution

  • Issues: delayed emergency response, politically influenced with USA being the biggest contributor, lack of enforcement power, underfunded, complex 🤑

How to measure wellbeing?

  • Easterlin paradox: GDP rose but happiness did not 📉, income and GDP are not always true indicators of hapieness

  • Way of taking into account subjective preferences

  • Hapieness Index - measurement of many factors, seen as a better way to measure

  • Happy Planet Index - with more of a focus on environment and well rounded

  • Gross National Hapieness - developed by Bhutan, priorities the well being of people over purely economic growth 😁

What are the issues with attempting to measure happiness?

  • Lack of attempt to capture social context and psychology and economics, even HPI,GNH aren’t able to capture 🤷🏻‍♀️

  • How can you measure success?

  • Are qualitative measurements taken into account, or only quantative?👥

  • Individualistic approach - fits neo-liberal agenda

  • Agenda set by affluent societies 💸

  • Neglects social problems

Your Better Life Index - OCED

  • Launched by OCED May 2011

  • Index compares well-being of people in different countries on 11 categories

  • Covers economic, quality of life, sustainability indicators as well as subjective aspects 🚘

  • Quality of life, material living conditions are also measured

  • 11 categories: housing, income, jobs, community, education, environment, governance, health, life satisfaction, safety, work-life balance 🌳

Quality of life 🕯

  • Measured by: life satisfaction/hapieness dimension

  • Objective/subjective indicators

  • Look beyond GDP as a measure 💶

Criticisms

  • Derives from psychological/economic perspectives but doesn’t account from 🧠social ones

  • Results in list of indicators

  • More affluent communities seen as more important

Social Progresss Index

  • Broader measure of national performance to social factors

  • Social progress is the capacity of a society to meet the basic humans needs of its citizens

CONCLUSIONS:

  • Latent structure analysis see how different dimensions relate to each other

  • Look at policy context/socil group in more detail

  • Levels of analysis, distinguish from aggregate results

  • Need for qualitative analysis

  • Understand digital transformations

  • Apply digital transformations across the world to non-affluent as well as affluent societies more systematically

KEY WORDS:

Global Health: health issues that transcend national boundaries and govt, call for actions on the global forces that determine health of people 🏥

Global Public Health:Activities within the health sector that address normative health issues, global disease outbreaks, pandemics as well as international agreements 🌎

Global Health Governance: Constitutional capability to ensure agenda coherence in global health, strengthen convening capabilities, transparency/accountability 🌾

Global health Diplomacy: Agreements reached in multilateral venues, new alliances in bilateral agreements 🗣

World Health Organisation (WHO)

World Bank (WB) 💷

International Labour Organisation (ILO)🕵

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OCED)

United Nations (UN)🌐

World Trade Organisation (WTO)™

Hapieness Index - measurement of many factors, seen as a better way to measure

Happy Planet Index - focus on environment and well rounded😁

Gross National Happiness - adopted by Bhutan prioritising well being over economic prosperity