Health care: a privilege, or a fundamental human right? Dr. Joia Mukherjee believes that the developed world sees it as the former when it is truly the latter. She spoke about public health and social justice to more than 300 students at GlobeMed’s national summit on Friday in Northwestern’s Cahn Auditorium.
GlobeMed is a student-run nonprofit organization that focuses on determining the role students ought to play in public health. The organization started at Northwestern five years ago, but has since expanded into a network of 32 chapters at colleges and universities across the country. This weekend at Northwestern, they will be holding their fifth annual national summit. This year’s theme is “Call to Action.” Over the course of the summit, students will think about how to seize on the support for public health and build it it into an efficient, cohesive effort.
Mukherjee is a faculty member in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. But she is also the medical director of Partners in Health, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the expansion of health services in the worlds poorest regions. Partners in Health began over 20 years ago working in Haiti, but now operates programs in many other countries, including Rwanda, Russia and Peru. Mountains Beyond Mountains, journalist Tracy Kidder’s book about Paul Farmer, the founder of Partners in Health, was this year’s “One Book, One Northwestern” selection.
In her work at Partners in Health, Mukherjee has directed the HIV programs in Haiti and Rwanda. She delivered the keynote address at the first GlobeMed Summit in 2006, and was impressed to see how the organization has grown. In her address, she praised students for their enthusiasm for helping the world’s most deprived, and encouraged students to keep advocating for social justice, no matter how grim the struggle.
Before her keynote address, Mukherjee sat down with North by Northwestern to talk about her work at Partners in Health, her conception of social justice and her vision of how to achieve it.
On the growth of Partners in Health
Partners in Health has evolved a lot since Mountains Beyond Mountains was published over ten years ago. We’ve grown from 250 staff members to over 1,300, and only a handful of us are American. We rely increasingly on local support. Now, the biggest piece of my own work is not so much direct involvement on the ground — although I still do some of that — as it is educating others.
We have more of a clear plan now than we did ten years ago, and it revolves around making health care a human right, building a movement and working with partners: both local partners and partners like GlobeMed. But we still live in a world where the right to health does not exist.
Redefining globalization
What we need to do is increase the desire to globalize justice, dignity and health care as a human right. If you Google “globalization” you’ll get all these bad results about exploiting countries for resources and profit — it has all these negative connotations, because thing that’s killing people is privatization. The focus is slowly changing, and your generation is really becoming enthusiastic about is globalizing health care. Imagine if we could do that!
The future of social justice
You can really compare what we’re doing to the civil rights movement. Even of people of my generation can’t believe that drinking fountains and public restrooms and restaurants used to be segregated. When my son is an adult, I want him to be bewildered that people everywhere around the world used to die of preventable diseases in unsanitary conditions. I hope that it’s incomprehensible.
How to achieve it
We have to make aid into a grassroots movement. How do we reach out to voiceless people? We need to create bonds of solidarity with our partners, not just out of charity, but out of joint work.
But even when we’ve set up successful programs, those of us that are transnational need to articulate problems in a way that people in those countries are not able to. Human rights requires civic protection: We have to work harder to convince our friends, neighbors and countrymen that health, education, housing, food, jobs — that all these things are human rights.
How undergrads can learn to make a difference
I don’t have an easy answer. Read broadly – -outside of class. I was a chemistry major in college, and I think I only took one liberal arts class. But when you read about something your interested in, it’s easy. In high school I hated history. All we did was memorize names of kings — who cares about that stuff? But now I can read about Haitian history for hours and I’m fascinated!