China Medical Board News

CMB President Lincoln Chen made a keynote speech at the workshop "Health and Economic Crisis: Tightening Belts, Expanding Minds," sponsored jointly by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Association of Pacific Rim Universities World Institute (AWI). The June 25, 2009 workshop brought together public health university leaders from Pacific Rim universities in Asia and the Americas to focus on creative public health actions in response to the global economic crisis. Dr. Chen's speech reviewed the knowledge base of previous financial crises in Asia, Mexico, Argentina, and Russia, underscoring the common expectation of economic belt-tightening in health expenditures, both public as well as private from households. He underscored that the economic effects could be as great if not even greater on the social determinants of health, impacting on poverty, food consumption, housing, and other key determinants. Dr. Chen then offered the provocative challenge of returning to large variability of population based health and economic levels. Economic crisis, well managed by health leaders, could offer unique opportunities to spark innovations for greater equity, efficiency, and productivity of health systems. Examples of such efforts were offered in programs to support health-positive household coping strategies in food and lifestyle behavior, deployment of low-cost medical technologies, mobilization of health workers, and health protection social funding. He concluded by observing that there is no automatic expectation that health would deteriorate with financial crisis. Rather, health outcomes during crisis are dependent upon policies and programs enacted, as demonstrated in many situations, for example in Britain during World War II which experienced the fastest decade of improvement of longevity in its 20th century.

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