Hans Rosling - Follow-up.

I hope that some readers enjoyed the TED talk by Hans Rosling. It's a good entry into the wealth of information and entertainment that TED talks contain. I wonder if any of you took a look at the tool that he used on the internet? It's available at http://www.gapminder.org/ for free. You can compare any countries to one another. It might be a good way to find success stories in health around the world and help us clear up our 'Healthcare system mission'.

Although Rosling seems to be suggesting that gaps have narrowed over the past half-century, which I agree with, I think there is another point that can be taken from the lecture. It combines his ideas with those of Jill Eisen, the host of a two-part CBC program on 'Sick People or Sick Societies' which laid out the social determinants of health and their importance of determining the health of communities and nations.

Health services are only one of many, and not the most important! That's an important fact and one we forget often in medical practice. The analogy of fishing drowning people out of a river and never going upstream to see who or what is causing them to fall in comes to mind.

At her lecture on debt Margaret Atwood referred to 'Universal Education' as a possible solution to social problems in Canada. She also didn't sound optimistic about the adoption of that idea...

Do you see any connections between the other determinants of health and the use of the healthcare system? It might stem from a mission for a healthcare system you read about below. Write in a comment and let's learn from one-another.