Reconstruction in South Sudan

January 31, 2018

How's it going, delegates!

The WHO dais and I know that the time to write position papers has come and that the deadline is approaching very quickly. We also know that it might be difficult to get adjusted to and get thinking about your assigned country's perspective and possible solutions to the exciting committee topics this year.

To give you delegates something tangible to think about and brainstorm, I found an excellent article about the need for healthcare and subsequent reconstruction in South Sudan (please note that despite the date of the article, this healthcare struggle is still currently occurring), which is linked here: https://www.hcs.harvard.edu/hghr/online/securing-health-care-in-war-zones/

Some key questions to consider when reading this article are "How important is healthcare education in my assigned country?", "Is education a feasible solution to healthcare infrastructure issues in my country (if there are indeed any) and why?", and "What are some intractable healthcare issues in my country that even education may not even be able to fix and how would I address them?"

The WHO dais really encourages productive discussion and interaction - our hope is that you delegates comment on this blog post with your answers to and/or analyses of these questions, not only for us to get a better idea of your country positions and topic solutions, but also to help you organize your own thoughts for your anticipated positions papers.

If you have any questions about positions paper guidelines, be sure to visit http://www.bmun.org/position-papers/. But feel free to message dmandal@bmun.org or any of the other members of the WHO dais if you have any other lingering questions or more information to help you with you paper - we'd be happy to assist and support you! We're excited to hear both your responses to this article and your positions papers!

Dhruv

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Neyda SandovalFebruary 11, 2018 at 2:29 PM
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Neyda SandovalFebruary 11, 2018 at 2:30 PM
According to the OECD, Germany has one of the most developed healthcare system, with high levels of hospital treatments and has increased its life expectancy rate by 5.5 years. seeing as though Germany devoted 11.3% of its GDP to the health sector, Germany outspends most countries when it comes to the infrastructure of health care. With this being said, Germany therefore believes that healthcare education within its own country is key in order to maintain its success and be a model for the international community. This is for the reason that with health education, Germany has been able to have successful hospitalization rates more than 50 percent higher than the OECD average. However, according to records regarding the health care sector, it has been reported that Germany’s main priority is the prevention of health risks such as contracting diseases as opposed to only health education. As a result, Germany created the Joint Action on Chronic Disease and Promoting Healthy Ageing Across the Life Cycle for Primary Prevention Program. This prevention program ensures that as everyone gets older a stronger protection and monitoring over disease expansion does not disrupt the health of germany.

Although the article provided in the blog stresses the need for healthcare education at the local level, Germany mainly focuses on ensuring extensive education for professional practitioners. In order to do so, Germany utilizes a dual system emphasizing apprenticeships and vocational training. Germany grants employers hosting apprenticeships subsidies, which are then monitored by The Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training. Germany current has over 7 million employees working in the healthcare sector, with a physician ratio of one doctor to every 218 members of the population. Additionally, since all citizens have mandatory health insurance, sufficient access to professional services has made it unnecessary to establish local education programs on basic medical treatment.

Even though Germany holds a high standard in health care, Germany still struggles to develop a long term solution, that education alone will not be able to solve. Currently, more than one-fifth of adults smoke daily in the country of Germany. That is about 22 percent of adult, which cause higher possibility to hospitalization in combination with the 11.7 per capita German alcohol consumption rate. These findings are among the highest in the world and Germany has yet to establish a long term prevention strategy that reduces smoking and drinking significantly. Now although education may be a factor that can combat the issue, Germany believes that it will not be able to make a significant impact.

Furthermore, Germany’s ageing population has led the country to fill the employment void with foreign health workers. However, as a majority of these workers have come from Russian descent, Russian organized crime has began to take root within the industry. By using extensive billing scams, these health officials have been able to demand more money from both their patients and German funded health insurance through illegal means. Seeing as how healthcare workers of foreign descent make up 30 percent of the entire industry, the German government must implement increased prevention measures to ensure these abuses can be prevented. However, while monitoring and anti-corruption legislature could pose as potential responses, education of these issues would do little to deal with the root of the problem.

-Delegation of Germany
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UnknownFebruary 14, 2018 at 9:16 PM
While South Sudan faces one of the most devastating health crises in history, Lipshultz has illuminated the fact that possibly where foreign health workers aren’t ensured protection despite international law, such as the Geneva Conventions, these local pockets of self-education may allow care to spread on a local level. Particularly highlighting the Cholera outbreaks, the most recent and longest one ending on February 7th, these virulent diseases have been combated through the government working with a range of international partners (ECHO, GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, USAID, WHO). An area where increased access to education of basic hygiene can prove most effective, France recommends programs that maybe distributes pamphlets or self-educating kits to help locals tackle the disease and prevent further spread. In the article Lipshultz mentioned using MSF, or Doctors without Borders, as an organization to provide this education and as the international group was founded in France in 1971, this delegates believes its important role in providing a means is indisputable. Recommending working through organizations and NGOs that will collectively use committee leaders as gateway’s to their communities, cooperation must be stressed.
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Delegation of ChinaMarch 1, 2018 at 6:45 PM
The war in South Sudan and its considerable effect on their healthcare system should be a warning to all members of the international community to take steps similar to those of pre-disaster measures for natural disasters but instead centered around saving the healthcare system within a country of conflict. China supports pre-conflict healthcare preparation to prevent instances such as that in South Sudan in which 160,000 individuals will be left without medical care. In addition to the recommendations by Lipshultz in her article “Securing Health Care in War Zones” that centers around coordination between medical charities and local community leaders to establish locally trained emergency health care workers to be active during times of conflict, China encourages the international community to cooperate to develop ways to prevent “Brain Drain” in regards to medical professionals. The primary cause of brain drain can be summed up in the article by Lipshultz and her comments on the desire of Médecins Sans Frontières to remove healthcare works due to safety precautions. “Brain drain” of healthcare workers from developing or war torn countries to developed nations due to safety and better opportunity leaves the departed country in a significant health care deficit, it has been found that 20% of physicians in developed countries come from countries abroad. There is in total about 60 million healthcare works and an obvious migration of these works to more developed countries for better pay is preventing the international community from achieving the United Nations sustainable development goal 2 of “good health and well being” and can be prevented if the international community develops an advantage for healthcare workers to stay in their home countries or return to their country of origin.

China has made it a priority, in its recent medical reforms starting in 2005, to decrease the disparities between urban and rural areas in regards to access and affordability of healthcare. We developed a strategic initiative known as New Rural Cooperative Medical Care System (NRCMCS) to make coverage more affordable for the rural populations that had been previously unintentionally neglected in Urban Resident Basic Medical Insurance (URBMI). China in the past, before NRCMCS was developed, has utilized a technique of localized healthcare education through the use of barefoot doctors at the top tier of the previously used Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme (RCMS) that were able to educate communities on basic hygiene practices and Traditional Chinese medicine. China believes we can apply a similar technique of encouraging the combination of traditional/indigenous medical practice and internationally supported westernized medicine education when training local emergency healthcare workers. This combination will allow for cultural empathy and increase the quality of healthcare provided to endemic regions.

Education of a larger amount of healthcare professionals in China is a viable solution to ensure there are enough healthcare workers to account for our large population and teach personal hygiene, as well as, basic preventative care techniques in both rural and urban areas. China has increased its GDP spending on healthcare from 3.4% in 1994 to 5.6% in 2013 which has allowed for healthcare coverage for 95% of our population. Some intractable healthcare issues that China has discovered that cannot be solved through education can be seen in the lack of treatment of serious diseases, such as cancer, in rural areas due to the fact that resources are concentrated in larger cities. Also, public discontent is at large due to the lack of efficiency in larger hospitals and the limited amount of community healthcare clinics. China would like to address these inefficiencies by evaluating population density when allocating healthcare supplies, along with developing preventive care clinics that can alleviate the pressure from larger hospitals that should specialize in treating serious illnesses and preventing the spread of disease.

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