Humanity First
Panagiota Kondyli
Lydiamls (Malesi)
Good health and well-being is equivalent to human happiness and improving life’s quality. For maintaining a healthy lifestyle, anyone needs a balanced diet, healthy habits, a decent shelter, and a proper health care system to rely on. The term “health” can be designated as a state of being physically, mentally, socially, and spiritually complete, while following the appropriate precautions to minimize the possibility of any disease, illness, and health issue in general.
Nevertheless, the current health care system definitely needs some rearrangement. In most countries, health care coverage is not reliable nor affordable enough and it is of great importance that there is a more notable effort on behalf of countries to acknowledge the unbridled condition regarding contagious diseases (such as Covid-19) or maternal health challenges. The system’s leaders need to fully commit to ensuring global health security and implement the International Health Regulations. In relevance to the above, Humanity First gathered the main goal targets regarding the third goal of SDGs, “Good Health and Well-Being”.
Practically, we cannot ignore that the possibility of reaching the above goals can only be accomplished by addressing the financing aspect for health in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Focusing on initiatives and organizations can only work if there are new financing models regarding each governance system.
Global health governance is based on the inclusion of donors and consignee countries, NGOs, private organizations and establishments, as well as partner foundations, although they have realized that political and economic conditions are inclined to change. For example, China has guaranteed to layout 12 billion U.S. dollars in the most underdeveloped countries (LDCs) by 2030.
The SDGs cover a wide range of social and economic development issues as well as social justice. All goals are also correlated directly or indirectly to SDG 3:
“Ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing for all at all ages”.
As for the political aspect, we believe that it’s important that our population’s health condition is improved by upgrading the quality of care, as well as by extending inclusive access and coverage with the help of proper financing of the health care systems. With that being said, we, the team of Humanity First, collectively decided that bettering human health and giving inclusively to all people access to affordable health care, is our main concern at the moment. As long as there is no efficient health coverage, people are obligated to pay off their medical bills and overall care with their own money, which frequently results in delays, postponements, and second thoughts about necessary treatments they need, severely risking their own health.
As mentioned above, the health care system is based on cooperation with stakeholders. Thus, Humanity First reached out to a plethora of stakeholders, such as “Ygeia” and “ActionAid”, to help raise awareness of the third goal of SDGs, the current issues they’re facing, and also help our team’s work to be known. On the other hand, they pledged to provide a certain amount of economical funds in order to collect a sufficient quantity of medicine, vaccines, etc. for patients that undergo hardships, while providing them mental assistance in public hospitals. Therefore, we focused on the financing aspect regarding our first initiatives. We noted that certain communities, or population groups, have a poorer quality of health care than others, which is often contributed by the population’s income. We are aiming to battle that inequity by funding money to people in need that cannot afford the care or don’t have access, through the above stakeholders who are able to provide.
Nonetheless, even if we know what is needed to better the status of health systems, it’s not an easy task. Decisions regarding health care are up to policy-makers and there are many risks when considering to make big moves. They have significant economic consequences and rearranging the whole system can be really hard, considering the possibility that some stakeholders don’t approve of reform. Given the fact that the evolution and development in medicine are extremely rapid and the economic and policy risks are very high, the rearrangement in health care systems is on one hand justified to be an ongoing, steady, and slow process.
Our project started with slow, but steady movements. The biggest problem that we faced was getting what was written down to reality, putting our plans into action. First, we started talking with our colleagues, in order to understand what’s more important, what creates the problems that they broached and how they thought that these could be solved. It was something like “brainstorming”, like helping ourselves to point to the problems that create other ones. However, a great number of students seem to be unaware of the seriousness of health problems. Many of them seem to be really upset when we informed them about the current health condition of the patients, and they were eager to be a part of our project so as to bring an end to what is happening. They suggested forming groups and gathering money from students to raise more awareness in the university. Thus, we discussed this, and we thought that what was best to be done is to create an “Instagram” raise, which many of these students reposted. Not only we earned followers, but also, we managed to raise a noteworthy amount of money, that was given to our partners. Nevertheless, it might seem like an easy thing to do, but our decision was made under a big pressure of not succeeding or of doing something wrong. We understood that what we were doing was of great importance, so we wanted everything to be perfect. At first, while doing the interviews we were searching for the personas that we have created. However, we couldn’t find people who matched everything that was written. What we noticed is that the main point of our personas was that we needed the personas to have the same excitement as we did. We needed to gather people that cared, that was easily there for the project, and secondly to match with the personas, because the personas were the ideal of what we wanted.
Our raise didn’t start so good. When we posted the raise our way of thinking wasn’t that persuasive. We haven’t allowed our audience to deeply understand who we are, what we are, and what we want, in a few words we didn’t have their trust, something that we understood that was important for them. In order to become trusted, we posted some quizzes, we let them know everything that was important to be trusted and we created an event, a digital one, where our group was live on Instagram and we were talking, playing, and chatting with our audience. That was the point where trust was built, so we reposted once again the raise with great results (great results for a project so small).
Gazing into our group, everyone can see that we started as a group of 7 and now we are 3. Nonetheless, we managed to cooperate perfectly, to communicate, and come up with great ideas and results, and we can now say that we are proud of the little that we helped and contributed to the existing health problem.
Furthermore, we have officially entered a period with rapid changes, a 4th Industrial Revolution, some can argue. AI (Artificial Intelligence) and new technologies have all overcome their infancy, forcing companies, foundations, organizations, and leaders to cope with a variety of new challenges in health care. In addition, the main challenges we faced during this era in healthcare, where nearly every sector is transformative, really hindered a lot of our ideas. Our first and biggest challenge was related to financial limitations, an obstacle that among others prevented some of our organization’s innovation and transformation goals. This can be attributed to the constant increase of demand in health care caused by a plethora of reasons, such as the expansion of aging populations and the increase in chronic diseases, cases of flu, and pandemics, especially in the Covid-19 era, when lots of clinics are filled with cases. Nevertheless, we cannot ignore the fact that we are a newly established business that hasn’t yet built our reputation and made ourselves known but most importantly don’t have the financial abilities yet to do so. For example, Humanity First, through collaborating with our top picked stakeholders, was aiming to supply underdeveloped countries with the required amount of medicine and also provide mental therapy to the people in need, but unfortunately, we have to build our trust first so people can open up and feel safe with us. Also, people are interested in raising money and contributing when they are familiar with a business. That’s why we collaborated with well-known health companies but also tried to evolve our online presence on social media. Last but not least, the transformation in health care and new innovative ideas that are never heard before require the availability of a skilled workforce. Although we are very passionate and enthusiastic about making this world a better place for people, we are yet a small business with not enough workforce. For example, the recent pandemic has provoked a variety of new technology evolvements, including telemedicine and telehealth, which we are not yet familiar enough yet.
Measuring impact is kind of like raising kids: It’s often hard, it costs more than you think it’s going to — and you absolutely have to do the best job you can. We funders are often eager to compare organizations, but the evaluation is first and foremost about understanding whether a nonprofit or social business is succeeding on its own terms. Whether they set out to get farmers out of poverty or rehabilitate stray cats, we need a way to know if they succeeded or failed, and to what degree. You need an ongoing stream of good-quality information, but you can’t spend a ton of money on it. Superficial data will get you nowhere but overdoing it will clog the works and probably leave you confused. What you need is an approach to impact measurement that is simple enough to do, but rigorous enough to mean something. We like to see an organization build evaluation into its operations, both for efficiency and because findings can be integrated quickly into operations. We’ve found that there are four steps that help us and those we work with think through a plan to measure impact:
1. Figure out exactly what you’re trying to accomplish
2. Pick the right indicator
3. Get good quality numbers
4. Show that it was you.
An ever-greater emphasis is being put upon the need for academic research to make an impact in the real world.
References
- https://www.g20-insights.org/policy_briefs/health-is-the-most-important-value-for-the-individual-person-and-for-society/
- https://www.oecd.org/health/developingahealthcaresystembenefitingall.htm
- https://healthcaretransformers.com/healthcare-business/biggest-challenges-healthcare/
- https://www.sspnet.org/library/what-is-real-world-impact-looking-at-impact-across-a-spectrum-of-influence-attention-and-affecting-change/
- https://ssir.org/articles/entry/real_world_impact_measurement#
