Where is the Global Health Movement?

I’ve been thinking about The Global Health Movement this week, after a chat on the topic with the team over at Change.org.  Is there such a thing, and where does it “live” online?

Thirty years ago, at the International Conference on Primary Health Care, a movement was born.  With principals outlined in the Alma Ata Declaration , the movement focused on achieving the goal of “health for all,” explicitly linking health with wealth and human rights.

Well, health for all certainly hasn’t materialized.  Most likely, steeper income gradients and other factors have led to quite the opposite.  If the goals haven’t been realized, where does that leave the movement itself?

As someone who has worked in global health and studied it, it seems to me that global health is a worldview above anything else.  It is an understanding that health is intrinsically linked with a host of other processes at play in the world: economic systems, human rights, politics, the environment…

Today, the global health movement that helped fuel the Alma Ata Declaration has been divided and subdivided into silos of different issues: the AIDS community, microbiologists, development workers, maternal health, children’s health, and others.  Each is a movement with the same essential goals of changing the structures that cause poor health and replacing them with structures that promote good health.  Or put differently, addressing the barriers and facilitators to health in a very broad sense.

For me, this post starts a new hunt for the online community that transcends the issue-based fragments of global health and brings them back together into one movement.