Primary Health Care at 30

phc30In September 1978, the International Conference on Primary Health Care was held in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, then part of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics (USSR). Led by the World Health Organization (WHO), the conference produced the Alma-Ata Declaration, which underlined the need for governments to protect the health of all citizens and emphasized that health for all is both a socioeconomic (or development issue), and also a human right. The conference also highlighted the inequalities between developed and developing countries, and between the elite and ordinary people within countries. Continue reading “Primary Health Care at 30”

Primary Health Care – 30 year update

HandsGlobe New studies show solid progress on child survival, including a decline in the annual number of under-five deaths, according to UNICEF. Global child deaths have reached a record low, falling below 10 million per year to 9.7 million, down from almost 13 million in 1990.

“This is an historic moment,” said UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman. “More children are surviving today than ever before.

Continue reading “Primary Health Care – 30 year update”

Meditations on Measurement

re: Community Assessment & Spiritual Mapping

microscopeThe Bible never assumes that our faculties are limited to our supposed “five senses.”

The Bible assumes that we are able to discern the essential nature of God from creation, and are therefore “without excuse.”

We all have God-given faculties to see the invisible world. We all have a built in microscope. Some of us don’t know its there. Some of us don’t know how to use it and many of us don’t know how to use it to consistently discern the reality of the spiritual dimension around us. (I may fall in this category.)

There is a big difference between rational and rationalism… between empirical and empiricalism. One says that reality can be substantially understood or measured, the later says that IF it cannot be understood or measured, THEN it doesn’t exist.

To be “tangible” means that it can be felt.

So if I can consistently feel or sense the spiritual realm, then it is tangible and no less empirical than anything else.  It was a rational, measurable (empirical) process that led Heisenburg to conclude that the Universe was not ultimately measurable.

Even with a real microscope, I cannot train a student to find a TB bacillus every time on a given pathology slide. Sometimes even the lab expert misses what they should have found. And it will always be this way, yet that doesn’t make microscopic lab work somehow “mystical”, only somewhat uncertain.

This week I want the Lord to help me use this faculty more consistently.

Allan Robbins 
© March 1999

Well-Baby Clinic

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Weighing children, the best way to evaluate child health is to monitor growth. Smokey Mountain, Manila

Yeah! We’ve obtained an invitation for our students to work alongside the ongoing immunization and well-baby programs that  YWAM-Balut runs on Smokey Mountain. (Their project leaders took the PHC school in Kona a couple years ago and the work here was launched after their field assignment.) Our students not only will gain a better understanding of how organized Well-Child program and clinic runs, but will gain valuable experience and confidence practicing their immunization, growth monitoring and other clinical skills. Phil3