Weekly Roundup 11 April

Just a few of my favorites from this last week…

• Learning from developing countries – Jaclyn Schiff at NPR has written an excellent article about lessons that so-called first-world countries can learn from third-world countries.  She references Lord Nigel Crisp’s op-ed in The Times which precedes his forthcoming book, Turning the World Upside Down: The Search for Global Health in the 21st Century.  Quote from him: “There are also general lessons for richer countries.  Unconstrained by our history, they train people differently, create new sorts of organisations, involve families and communities and concentrate more on promoting health rather than tackling disease.” 

 

• Top 50 Health Blogs – check out this latest list at Health Sherpa, where I’ve certainly found a few new ones to follow

• As aid flows increase substantially, what about performance measurement?…Nandini Ooman and David Wendt at Global Health Policy have articulated many of the concerns that I share about allocation of funding by the top HIV/AIDS funders, PEPFAR, Global Fund and the World Bank.  They have gone a step further and given specific recommendations to each on how to improve performance measurement to better allocate funding.

• …but is overall funding really increasing?  Karen Grepin raises some excellent questions in her Friday post, basically poking holes in the overall increase in aid flows for health to developing countries.  She discusses the fungibility of health spending and makes the case that disease-specific project aid (specifically that which is focused on commodities) could be squeezing out national government spending on health systems and workers.  Very well-written and I encourage a thorough read.

 

• Happiness, human communities, and cars – last weekend, I read a particularly enjoyable post (or a weekend ramble, as he dubbed it) from David Roberts about the ecosystems created by human spaces, and why our currently car-friend communities are not conducive to happiness (hey, did you know that happiness peaked in the 1950s?  This was shocking to me.)  Then, the conversation continued into the week with a second post that mapped out the specific issues in Roberts’ own community, its current and historical layout, and gave suggestions for improvement.  He writes: “…one of the biggest challenges in years ahead, as we attempt to densify and green our communities, will be retrofitting existing neighborhoods to increase walkability, sociability, sustainability, and safety. It’s worth a minute of anyone’s time to ponder how they could make their own surroundings more amenable to spontaneous, non-commercial, human-scale social interaction.”   Hear, hear.