"We Fully Embrace the Rights-Based Approach to Health Care"

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Nov 16, 2012
by Louise Hallman
"We Fully Embrace the Rights-Based Approach to Health Care"

World Bank President Dr. Jim Yong Kim expresses support for Right to Health during video-link speech

Jim Yong Kim expresses support for Right to Health during video-link speech


World Bank president Dr. Jim Yong Kim surprised, delighted and reassured Salzburg Global Seminar faculty and Fellows on Tuesday, November 13 when he expressed his support for the right to health.

“We fully embrace the rights-based approach to healthcare,” Kim told the participants gathered from 22 countries across the globe during a video-conference link as part of the closing session of seminar ‘Realizing the Right to Health’. This was the first time thenewly appointed World Bank president had publicly expressed his support for the approach, in his second appearance via video-link to a Salzburg Global Seminar session on health and health care.

Introduced by Maria Luisa Escobar, manager of the Health Systems Practice at the World Bank Institute, a clearly enthused Kim was flanked by two of his World Bank vice presidents, Sanjay Pradhan and Tamar Manuelyan Atnic, whom Kim referred to as “master clinicians of development”.

Following his opening remarks, in which he thanked the participants of the session for dedicating their time to debating the issue of the right to health, Kim gave feedback on Fellow-led initiatives aimed to improve the realization of the right to health in their home countries.

The presentations included a team from Egypt, with their plans to improve governance in the health care system by involving the local communities in their post-revolution nation; South Korea, with their plan for a ‘Open Healthcare Info Bank’ – a platform for collecting, validating, processing and delivering health information, which would verified in its amount, content and quality, with the objective of enabling informed and knowledgeable decision making; and a cross-national group aimed at improving women’s health through greater social participation in health care delivery.

Kim highlighted the importance of maternal health, which he said was a logistics and systems issue, as much as a medicinal issue. This was reiterated by vice president Atnic, who said mothers were an “enormous agent for growth and development”.

Kim called the right to health a multi-faceted issue and urged health care practitioners and policy makers not to “just advocate for single disease programs.”

“They are important,” the president said, “but we have to think [about] the entire system” and countries need to have “robust” programs to “give healthcare to everyone”.

“There is no off-the-shelf system that will fix a particular country,” added Atnic, stating that countries needed to look at multiple models and case studies to find what would work best for them.

Closing the session after Kim’s remarks, his former Dartmouth colleague and recently appointed director of the Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science, Albert Mulley quoted Margaret Mead – acclaimed American anthropologist and faculty of the first ever Salzburg Seminar in American Studies in 1947 – when he concluded the afternoon’s presentations, saying:

“Some people doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world, when in fact nothing else ever does.”

As the Fellows return to their home countries and work on the next steps of their ambitious initiatives, they would be wise to remember those words.