Recently I met a lot of leaders in public and global health.
The World Affairs Council is a Seattle non-profit which organizes for leaders from other countries to come to Seattle and give presentations. Global Health Nexus promotes talks about health issues in Seattle. WAC definitely does a lot more events.
On June 6 WAC had a layman cancer presentation at Fred Hutchinson. Larry Corey was hosting the event, and as guests there was a panel consisting of high-ranking (both professionally and in the context of government health office) persons from Egypt, Kazakhstan, Oman, and the West Bank. In addition to these, there were health delegates from other countries present and all of these had come to attend some conference.
On June 20 GHN helped William Foege, the smallpox guy, bring His Royal Highness the Emir of Argungu to speak at a panel South Lake Union about the role of religion in healthcare. There were some religious nonprofit organizations in attendance.
On June 28 my congressional represenative Jim McDermott brought Festus Mogae, former president of Botswana, to speak downtown. This event was also coordinated by the World Affairs Council. I had heard of Mogae before, because his story was that when Africa was coming to realize the extent of the AIDS crisis many countries chose to take no special action or to otherwise be independent in dealing with it, but Mogae was unusual in saying that his country was in need of advice and aid. Western countries in response were happy to have the support of an African leader, and huge programs were tested. Mogae said that his country was able to afford to pay about 5% of the cost of AIDS drugs, and he offered this to a lot of companies who refused him. But eventually someone found a way to use this as a start for programs, and that and his willingness to invest in health infrastructure made Botswana’s health programs successful in reducing the impact of HIV infection in their region.
I enjoy hearing McDermott speak and the format of the event was that Mogae spoke for an hour then they fielded questions. Mogae was candid about shortcomings, saying “Wow, we were wrong about this” and “We did not expect this aspect to be so important”. It was a relief to hear a leader tell the truth about how things were and give good information about what works and say that it is based on the experience of trying new things and risking failure, but I suppose that is a luxury which can only be afforded to entities which do not present a image of being the “world’s best” at something.
These events were the typical get-togethers where a bunch of older, hopefully rich people are invited to be entertained with stories about developing countries in hopes that they will make financial contributions. For the last WAC event there was a youth group there but frankly the young future leaders there did not seem interested at all and the ones with whom I spoke had little background knowledge on who they were seeing and what the issues were. At the first event at Fred Hutchinson the talk was very interesting and a significant portion of the audience was foreign and wanting to chat, but the event was not well-attended because it was not well-advertised. The talks for all of these were entirely for laymen and I know Seattle has a base which would be interested in going to these things were they better publicized.
At all of these events I had the same question for the speakers which I always have for almost anyone – “How has the advent of internet changed your field?” For a lot of people in the computer industry, the expectation would be that everyone nowadays gets basic computer training for use in everything. The reality is that this just is not the case. I know that even major players in Seattle prefer to avoid computers and are generally mistrustful of them in comparison to the low tech alternatives, like for example, they will print information on paper but never make the same information available in any form on their website. Or they will require people to contact a human to request information instead of having an online process for granting it, or they will buy print advertising but not (cheap, traceable) computer advertising. Or they will want to distribute paper information or media content, but not want to do so for digital content, because someone might “steal” it, as if there is a criminal population waiting to exploit weaknesses in the distribution of nonprofit media.
At the cancer meeting, all four panelists and Larry Corey responded. Someone brought up that now they get announcements about conferences and they did not before, so this is how their field has changed. They also talked about medical technology which outputs sample test data, but to me, there is a sharp distinction between internet as interpersonal communication technology and internet as the means by which to update non-communication software. They all said that their client base, which were people in industrial economies, were not using computers to access health information. I got the impression that they thought that their patients did not want information by this route; it is my counter belief that they would not be opposed to it if it were available to them and the more available it was the more they would prefer it.
At the religious conference I talked to the representatives of several nonprofits which do global health work. None of them had yet made a place for the benefits of internet communication in their work, and I understand that there is an associated skill set to master to get access to these benefits but it just bothers me that this skill set is so neglected in this sector. I talked to some people at PATH and I was telling them how I wanted access to some of their reports and they seemed receptive to my requests for these. Then they referred me to their chief, the “knowledge management coordinator” of World Vision’s “Global Health Centre.” I asked her about being able to see World Vision reports, and she told me that these were available on request. I do not think they restrict access to these, but rather they just have no habit or motivation to put them online. I told them that I had problems navigating their website, and she acknowledged that it had problems, but countered by saying that most of their funders and supporters do not use the website. I was feeling really weird at this point – it was my thought that if improving the website only resulted in a miniscule increase in website visitors converting to become supporters then the cost of getting consulting for website and improving the UX would pay for itself in less than a year and continue to give returns perpetually. I asked her what kind of web team World Vision has and why they have a website for each country which is almost entirely a copy from a template of a generic organization page. She said they made those and they are sufficient, and that a few years ago World Vision had only spent $40 in excess of staff salaries and maintenance for investing in their web presence. She thought this was funny and quirky of them, as if they had maximized their success without resorting to wasteful modern fads like the internet. I had been talking about editing the World Vision Wikipedia page with the others, and also I had been talking with them about a meetup of local non-profits in the health field who might want to get together and talk about online social networking like how to manage Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, bloggers, and the rest. The knowledge manager told me that “We are proud of our website the way it is and our history of success proves that it is best.” I really wish that she could have been insulting me in rejection when she said that, but I think the reality was that she truly could not comprehend any need for her organization, with assets of a billion dollars, to put any more thought into managing their internet PR than by asking the people in charge of it if they knew how to set up a Facebook account. I wished her good luck and walked away thinking that I had met the typical employee at an organization who has the power to decide whether millions of people live or die and yet has no idea that their internet policy accounts for a large part of those lives.
Mogae and McDermott were the only ones who said that internet is right now an important part of global health even in the poorest countries, which is what I wanted to hear. They both talked about communication networks where orders can be distributed quickly from the top but also how people at the bottom can either send questions up or ask them laterally. It is my idea that even if so much as a single top doctor in the hospitals of major cities has internet access and knows what to do with it, then the health of the entire region has a much better chance of both being protected and improving for lots of reasons.