First and Third: One World Serious Health View

By Rob Thames

“Don’t go walking around like you just hit a triple – when you were born on third base.”

- unknown

“He wants to know why your skin is white and his is black,” clarified my translator. The Tanzanian boy, about 10 years old, was pointing to the skin on his hand and then to mine. His question in this remote kijiji (Swahili for village) was as arresting and profound as the inequities in global health.

My global interdisciplinary health team was in Africa as part of a feasibility assessment in partnership with a Tanzanian team to determine how to improve health in the region near Lake Tanganyika, which borders western Tanzania. While Tanzania is considered a low-resource, less developed country, the western region is considered the least developed area within this ‘third world’ country.

Global HealthRob ThamesNovember 5, 2019healthcare, global health, global health development, food desert, inequity

Lessons from Global Health Development: Insights from Four Change Models

By Rob Thames

This is Part 3B of this three-part series.

Part 3A briefly reviewed four change methods. This Part 3B compares them to elicit insights.

Motivational Interviewing, Kotter’s 8-Step Model, Baldrige Communities of Excellence, and SEED-SCALE, reviewed in Part 3A, were selected to reflect and reveal the wisdom of a range of disciplines, applications at different levels (individual, organizational, community and population) and purposes to aid change practitioners in the thinking and doing of their craft. How can comparing these models elicit deeper insights to affect sustainable change sooner and better?

Lessons from Global Health Development: Harnessing Methods of Change

By Rob Thames

This is Part 3A of this three-part series.

This Part 3A briefly reviews four change methods and Part 3B will compare them.

“I have no idea how to change anyone. But I carry around a long list of people in case I ever figure out how.” - Anonymous

Eliminate four billion dollars of waste from a large healthcare system next year. Increase the CMS TPS (Total Performance Score) for a hospital from the national average of 38.1 to 60 in two years. Reduce maternal, child and infant mortality in Nigeria by 50% in three years. These are large-scale improvement goals – at healthcare system, hospital and population health levels, respectively.

Lessons from Global Health Development: Relief vs Development

By Rob Thames

This is Part 2 of a three-part series

“Help! I need somebody! Help! Not just anybody. Help!” – The Beatles

When a cry for help begs a response, how do we assure that productive help, not just good intention, actually happens?

When faced with failure, what does a responder do? As an expert/advisor, you have a choice: correct the specific failure or strengthen the system (Taylor, Just and Lasting Change). To make this decision, it is critical to discern: is this an event-induced “disaster” – Ebola, Tsunami, Hurricane – or is it a chronic, systematic, or lifestyle-induced failure? In medicine, the difference is how a physician treats a patient with emergency trauma vs a patient with a chronic disease. The global relief vs development challenge has a healthcare leadership parallel: rescue or strengthen.

Lessons from Global Health Development: Sustainable Change Contrarian

By Rob Thames

Part 1 of a three-part series

“We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.”― Albert Einstein

In the U.S., some refer to healthcare system change as an oxymoron. It is complicated. It is hard. And while progress has been made, we have a long way to go.

But if such change in healthcare is challenging in the richest nation, then imagine it in low resource countries. In many sub-Saharan African countries, healthcare must compete with investment in other more impactful determinants of health such as education, food security, and sanitation that, if present, are weakly established. Layer in different governments, languages/dialects, and cultures; include frontier rural locations, tribal influences and religious differences and the challenge to improve health and healthcare in countries such as Tanzania, Madagascar, and Nigeria can feel truly overwhelming.

Healthcare, Interim, LeadershipRob ThamesApril 30, 2019healthcare, global health development, interim, ceo