Beyond COVID19—can we heal the gaps in our healthcare system?

Nothing in recent memory has tested healthcare systems across the global north (higher income and developed nations) the way the current pandemic has. I use the word ‘systems’ specifically in this case, for it is the way we view the delivery of healthcare as a system that determines our local and national responses.

In Rwanda, President Paul Kagame recently launched emergency food rations to be distributed to over 20 000 families in the capital city Kigali to assist citizens in adhering to and surviving through the strict lockdown (Dano, 2020). The Rwandan government understood that this was required to prevent spread of the virus beyond the capital city, where healthcare is scarce, and controlling the spread of the virus may have been impossible. Food therefore formed part of the public health response and was ‘part’ of the healthcare system.

In the early 1990s the internationally renowned global health physician, Professor Paul Farmer, who was at the time a young infectious disease doctor, found that he could achieve a tuberculosis cure rate of close to 100% in the central plains of Haiti. His ‘secret’ he joked, was the simple combination of community health workers, anti-tuberculosis medications, and a monthly stipend of $30 USD to help pay for food and travel to medical appointments.