LSE hosted the public launch of the university’s new Global Health Initiative on Tuesday 24 October. The event was started by Professor Julia Black, LSE's Pro Director for Research, who was chairing the event. She highlighted the importance of launching the Global Health Initiative this year, given LSE is celebrating Beveridge 2.0, 75 years anniversary of the Beveridge Report, published in 1942. The Initiative creates a platform across the LSE to talk about one of the Beveridge's five giants - disease - in a global context. She was followed by three panel speakers who all showed that for global health research and policy to be effective, biomedical science has to be enriched by social sciences research.
The panel was started by Professor Catherine Campbell from the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science. Professor Campbell discussed her work on programmes to support health-related behaviour change by women in extremely difficult settings. She reflected on the research she did on sex workers in mining communities and volunteer female home-based carers in rural areas in South Africa, as well as her research on rejection of Ugandan Marriage and Divorce bill that sought to ease women’s ability to seek divorce. Professor Campbell concluded by warning that we have to be careful to impose goals, such as reporting or leaving husbands, and concepts, such as a notion of feminist revolutionary subject, on community mental health programmes in marginalised settings. Programmes might often be better served by goals and activities that women themselves see as achievable and desirable. Programmes’ designs and evaluations must acknowledge that significant struggles for women’s health may often be equally importantly tackled through small scale hidden acts of resistance, located in small often barely visible cracks in the social order. Recognising more distributed and complex forms of agency and activism is vital for rejuvenating analysis and activism by marginalised women and their allies in the global health context.
Professor Elias Mossialos, the Head of Department of Health Policy, reflected on both the current policy-relevant research projects that are being carried out by the Department as well as more conceptual issues around how global health should be studied in the future. He noted that health politics and health economics often fail because we try to emulate natural sciences. Instead, the research should move beyond the purely technical and focus on social science as public philosophy. Over the past 20 years academics in LSE Health were trying to develop a synthetic conceptual framework, the so-called phronetic-technical. Without underestimating the value of econometrics and statistics, Professor Mossialos argued for bringing in the phronetic, the value-based elements into the discussions. Based on this approach, the research is examined using the following five questions: where are we going? What is this desirable? Who is at risk every time we are introducing a new health policy? Who gains and who loses from this health policy? And – what should be done? Lastly, Professor Mossialos discussed the examples of researching private medical insurance across the world and particularly in the United States to illustrate practically ineffective health systems that exclude higher risk population groups.
Lastly, Tim Allen from the Department of International Development gave the final talk in the panel on neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), thus showing a different, anthropological, side of global health research at LSE. Initial research interest was sparked by a global programme in mass drug administration for so-called neglected tropical diseases. Many advocacy groups argued that neglected tropical diseases should be a focus of that particular funding – and they were successful. Based on the initial funding success, there is now great supply of medicines to tackle NTDs, mostly parasitic diseases. Professor Allen discussed the concern that once the people, who were likely to be very impoverished, received these medications, their lives would be transformed. There would be rich biological information about their changing disease profiles available. This information could be looked at in terms of how their social and cultural lives change. And indeed, it transpired that there were actually very few people taking the tablets. There emerged evidence that these programmes were not working for these particular people. Distribution of tablets ran counter the local understandings and other public health campaigns. Mass administration of drugs do not work without other types of inputs, communications and ways of engaging population. After public campaign to convince the funders and local governments that it does not work, current research focuses on those places where public drug administration actually work in order to understand the reasons behind the pockets of success.
The panel was followed by the keynote speech by Geeta Rao Gupta that you can watch here.