Thoughts from The Global Health Consortium at UIC

This past week UIC celebrated Global Health Day with its first annual Global Health Consortium. The conference was created by the Global Health Research Collaborative (GHRC). The aim of the GHRC is to combine resources and faculty from all professional colleges at UIC in an effort to better coordinate international efforts and academic research, as well as providing more resources for health science students to study and serve abroad.

One of the highlights of the evening was looking back at Haiti. The panel consisted of 2 academic physicians (both of whom have worked in Haiti, one who was a native Hatian), and a representative from a NGO. The mutually agreed problem in the health care delivered after Haiti’s earthquake was, as expected, entirely organizational. As I sat listening to the speakers’ experiences, I asked myself how can multilateral efforts be better organized in the absence of a functional government? While the instinct is to lean towards centralization (the WHO appears first to mind), perhaps that may not be the best approach. Geographic, technological, financial, communicative, and prerogative barriers would suggest that, perhaps its best to avoid excessive coordination. The alternative however, seems too brash. Where global collaboration and post-partisan do goodism is the de-facto environment, are we capable of drawing borders for the sake of efficiency?