A global health equity agenda for the G8 summit

Abstract

ConclusionsLearning from other healthcare systems is not straightforward, but all systems face the same fundamental problems of quality, safety, access, usability, availability, and affordability-and all perform suboptimally. We see increasing examples of interaction and learning among systems. Such learning will benefit patients.Contributors and sources: LQ was a Rhodes scholar in Oxford and is now the chief executive of Ovations, which provides services for seniors in the United States. She also worked with Hillary Clinton on the reform of US health care. Formerly a member of the BMJ editorial board, she has worked closely with staff in the Department of Health and the NHS to establish programmes in England. RS was editor of the BMJ and chief executive of the BMJ Publishing Group for 13 years. Before becoming the editor he spent a year at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford in California. LQ and RS produced a list of possible options for transatlantic learning, partly through the experience and reading and partly through asking others on both sides of the Atlantic. RS produced the first draft, which LQ then corrected. Both have read and approved the final version. RS is the guarantor.

The G8, Globalization, and the Need for a Global Health Ethic

“…The report card work initially addressed commitments made at the 1999 through 2001 Summits, although subsequent publications updated the analysis to include the 2005 Summit at Gleneagles, which arguably represented the zenith of G8 interest in development issues as of mid-2008 Labonte, Schrecker, & Gupta, 2005;Labonte & Schrecker, 2006;Schrecker, Labonte, & Sanders, 2007;Labonte & Schrecker, 2007a). We first considered the 3 extent to which G8 countries had lived up to their Summit commitments.…”

Globalization and social determinants of health: Introduction and methodological background (part 1 of 3)

“…The second article describes a number of key 'clusters' of pathways leading from globalization to equity-relevant changes in SDH. Building on this identification of pathways, the third article provides a generic inventory of potential interventions, based in part on an ongoing program of research on how policies pursued by the G7/G8 countries affect population health outside their borders [23-29]. It then concludes with a few observations about the need for fundamental change in the values that guide industrialized countries' policies toward the much larger, and much poorer, majority of the world's population living outside their borders.…”

Foreign policy matters: a normative view of the G8 and population health

“…A second approach, exemplified by health equity agendas, 52 focuses on policy content. In our North American experience, understanding how social determinants of health are affected by policy choices outside the health sector and half a world away is highly limited even among otherwise sophisticated decision-makers and researchers.…”