UNIVERSITY COALITIONS for GLOBAL HEALTH

Hey there global health enthusiasts!

I owe you all a BIG thank you for participating in the poll on the Lancet Student website entitled “What issue would you most like to campaign on?” The results are in and as you can all see, the Right to Health is a straight shot winner followed by Access to Essential Medicines and Strengthening Health Systems as the top three.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, UCGH empowers students to ignite change on global health issues. Each year the UCGH Steering Committee (comprised of representatives from various student global health organizations) gathers to decide the coming academic year campaigns. This year we were blessed to have input from all of you (which seemly made our jobs easier) and based off your voting the Steering Committee has envisioned a new direction of UCGH advocacy.

Rather than arbitrarily choosing three campaigns, the Committee has listened to your voices and now is restructuring UCGH to have a clearly defined advocacy mission that will be the unifying trend between all campaigns. The UCGH advocacy mission will be:

“Through the empowerment of young people, UCGH aims to combat global medical apartheid by ensuring that all people have the right to health as defined by United Nations General Comment 14.”

This new mission allows UCGH to expand its campaigns and incorporate many more student organizations, because General Comment 14 not only calls for access to healthcare, but it also encompasses the underlying environmental, societal and cultural determinants of health. The right to health remained no more than a slogan for more than 50 years, but now General Comment 14 is starting an international movement to obtain quantifiable and measurable standards for the right to health and UCGH wants to join in!

Within this new larger mission, each year the Steering Committee will identify three issues that are crucial for instilling the right to health. This year the Committee has chosen; Access to Essential Medicines, Strengthening Health Systems and Ensuring Health Equity. Each issue allows UCGH to create several different campaigns. For example, under the Health Equity issue UCGH will be advocating for the HIV Prevention Act as well as the Convention on the Rights of the Child. We are unveiling these advocacy approaches this Fall.

Stay posted to hear more about UCGH campaigns!

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 15th, 2007 at 6:08 pm and is filed under Child Health, Women's Health, Access to Medicines, Healthcare Workers, Neglected Diseases. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.