The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has popularised the vocabulary of Grand Challenges in global health, in a rather narrow and biomedically focussed way. What happens when we broaden the frame of reference to include macro-scale economic and social trends that influence both the social determinants of health and the political prospects for such aspirations as universal health coverage?
In this seminar Ted Schrecker, Professor of Global Health Policy at Newcastle University’s Institute of Health and Society, will argue that the most important Grand Challenges in global health arise from increasing economic inequality and the public policies that reflect and reinforce it, and from the tension between legitimate aspirations of the majority of the world’s people and the biospheric implications of meeting them. He will also argue for a changed understanding of global health that reflects the proliferation of world-scale inequalities in countries rich and poor alike.
Speaker:
Professor Ted Schrecker (@NclUni_IHS) moved from Canada in 2013 to take up posts first at Durham University and (since 2017) at Newcastle. His research has been published in journals including Social Science & Medicine, Health and Place, Health Policy and Planning, Global Public Health and Globalization and Health. He is co-author, with colleague Clare Bambra, of How Politics Makes Us Sick: Neoliberal Epidemics (2015) and also serves as co-editor of the Journal of Public Health.
Chair:
Dr Justin Parkhurst (@justinparkhurst) is Associate Professor in Global Health Policy in the Department of Health Policy He is Chair of the LSE Global Health Initiative. He is interested in global health politics and policy and the political aspects of the use of evidence to inform policy decisions.
The slides from this presentation are available here.