Dartmouth President Discusses Future of Global Health Delivery

Focusing on the delivery of health care will not only help reform the current, flawed medical system, but will also become the newest frontier in science, Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim said in a lecture at Harvard yesterday.

At the talk, entitled “Why We Can’t Wait: Building A Science of Global Health Care Delivery,” Kim discussed his experiences working with diseases that affect impoverished nations.

Kim, who co-founded the international non-governmental organization Partners in Health, discussed how his own experiences in the global health field helped to shape his endeavors today, which include promoting public health programs at Dartmouth.

As that university’s leader, Kim has been involved in the development of the Masters in Health Care Delivery Science program, a joint venture between the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and the Tuck School of Business. The program is designed to address the issue of delivering low-cost health care to all types of people.

To reform the current health care system and help more lower-income people, Kim said more scientists will need to study this field.

“It can’t just be one campus,” Kim said. “It has to be every medical school in every country tackling this problem.”

When working with victims of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis in Africa, Kim said he found a link between morals and epidemiological rationale.

The wealthy often do not take responsibility for the welfare of poor people, Kim said, and they give up when confronted with the difficulties of health care distribution.

Instead, this group should seek new alternatives, he said.

“Every time you think it’s too costly or too expensive, think again,” Kim said. “If you’re serious, take on a fight at every level.”

Speaking on World AIDS Day, Kim also gave a brief history of the expansion of the disease into a pandemic, from its introduction in America during the 1980s, to the protests that erupted years later in opposition to the rapid spread of AIDS.

Kim’s own experiences working with AIDS date back to 2003, when he worked with a former director general of the World Health Organization to create the “3x5” campaign, in which the WHO promised to put three million people in developing countries on AIDS treatment by 2005.

“We couldn’t believe people were saying to the 25 million people in Africa with AIDS: ‘I’m sorry... but you’re dead,’” Kim said.