Expanded Partnerships Needed to Advance Global Health, say Global Health Leaders
The solutions to today’s most pressing global health challenges will only be found through innovative coalitions that transcend barriers separating disciplines, institutions, sectors and countries. That is the urgent message of the global health leaders who gathered at McMaster University last week for the annual meeting of the advisory board of the MSc Global Health program.
“Diseases have no borders, pests have no borders, fertilization has no borders, pollution has no borders,” says Dr. Priscilla Reddy, Director of the Medical Research Council’s Health Promotion Research and Development Unit in South Africa.
Reddy is one of nine board members – all eminent professionals with diverse backgrounds in the private sector, NGOs, and health-care consultancies worldwide – who provide strategic direction to the MSc Global Health program. The program’s transdisciplinary, collaborative approach reflects the board members’ conviction that the traditional definition of global health must be expanded to include new partnerships.
“One of the most important developments in global health today is the movement to bring together agriculture, the environment and people in a ‘one health’ kind of thinking,” says Reddy.
To produce global health trailblazers, the institutional obstacles that keep medical, scientific, technological and business disciplines separate must be broken down, says Mary Heersink, an internationally known food safety advocate. “Moving forward, we will all need to collaborate through consortiums.”
Andrea Baumann, Director of the Global Health program at McMaster, echoes this assertion. “Tackling global health issues requires a strong commitment to collaboration between institutions, and an interconnectedness between disciplines. We created this program with the belief that higher education consortiums like this will be critical to solving these challenges.”
Luis Barreto, a leader in the field of vaccine development, biotechnology and science policy, points to the success of diverse international partnerships that rapidly produce and disseminate vaccines to millions of people in some of the world’s poorest countries. “It’s gratifying to see this trend, with coalitions for immunization bringing together various countries and private and public partners to address pandemic influenza, Hep C and E, Ebola, MERS and others,” he says.
Barreto believes the future of global health initiatives in Canada depends in part on a stronger government commitment to science and technology (S&T) and industrial research and development (IR&D). He currently sits on the Council of Canadian Academies’ Expert Panel on the State of S&T and IR&D.
During the board’s visit to campus, they were joined by faculty from McMaster, Maastricht, Manipal universities, and the University College of Southeast Norway (HSN), as well as Regine Aalders, Counselor for Health, Welfare and Sport, Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and McMaster University President and Vice-Chancellor, Dr. Patrick Deane. Deane’s Forward with Integrity initiative has called for action to “enhance McMaster’s international research partnerships and collaborations and to meaningfully incorporate global perspectives into student learning.”
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