Global health: reflections on international health systems and policy

¶ … improvements in health since 1960, there are still a quantity of challenges, which should have been easy to resolve. As a person, all through my career, I have personally chosen to focus on the opportunities and experiences produced within the area of global health differences. Nevertheless within this area, there is an abundant divide among global aspects of health issues, for instance the effect of inequality and poverty that are really bothering me. With that said, this paper will give a personal involvement with global health through my experience with the illness of my professor.

I was heartbroken when I learned of my professor illness. She was not just a respected professor but a good nurse. She was only 40 when her health was challenged. It started because she did not want to stay in an unhealthy work environment, she made the decision that she didn't want to continue to work in a place where bosses boss and no one leads. It was just a toxic setting to be in.

She basically just used that motivation, to find her another job. During that time, after doing an employee physical and chest x-ray it was shown that there were some abnormalities which led to more testing and a final diagnosis of colon cancer with metastases to her lungs. She was just 40 years old and all of this was going on. It was apparent that she wanted to just give up after hearing this devastating news. Dying of lung cancer is a huge major health problem and has been on the rise. She was not even a person that smoked. This health concern really caused me to want to evaluate certain environments in order to see if they were safe from second hand smoke and most were not. I even found out that this was a huge global concern because there were not a lot of places that challenged unhealthy environments that had second hand smoke.

I had to learn that with her lung metastasis, the treatment should be able to depend on what the cancer is doing. Usually, if nodules start showing on the lung of a colorectal cancer patient, those would be taken off by surgery, if at all possible, as a way to identify the problem and possibly cure it in total. It was obvious that this also brought great stress on her life but she was able to use God as her outlet.

With this concern, she also started to develop some fluid collections that around the lung. These are treated chiefly by giving patients chemotherapy and then emptying those gushes. While she was going through this crisis, I discovered that one way to drain them is to use what is a pleural catheter, where a small plastic tube is introduced into the chest and can be connected to a small throwaway vacuum bottle. .

The discussion board and blog sessions dialog contributed to my development of a global health perspective because I wanted to make a difference in seeing people live in a clean and healthy environment without them getting sick. It also helped me to realize that never before has the health situation gotten worse in so little time. At the same time, discussion board and blog sessions dialog helped me to see that exposures to major health risks in a new light. Going beyond 2015 it is obvious that we are moving from an age concentrating mostly on global health concerns and the need to put extreme healthy life expectation at the center of our minds and work.

Also, discussion board and blog sessions dialog helped me to see that putting health first really makes a difference along with making sure that every environment is clean and healthy. However, how to make it occur and how to offer the right encouragements and accountability will involve a new type of research.

Finally and most importantly discussion board and blog sessions dialog helped me to ponder on -- what does it take to permit persons to change their behaviors? What does it take for them to want to do something different? If it is not broke of course don't fix it but what if it is though? There is an important need in nursing to fully understand why people are making healthy or non-healthy selections in expressions of lifestyles, and how this knowledge can be interpreted into actions both at the institutional and political levels.

When it comes to the importance and challenges of impacting global health equity in contemporary nursing practice technology seems to be the center of it all (Sinha, 2011). Whereas countless forces are changing the face of contemporary healthcare, one could make the argument that nothing will change the way nursing is practiced if they do not embrace the new technology. Technology in nursing is altering the world at warp rapidity and nowhere is this more obvious than in healthcare environment.

However, health inequality on the other hand labels differences, variations and conflicts in health successes of groups and individuals. Global health equity does not suggest moral judgment. Health inequalities are considered to be avoidable and unfair differences in health status experienced by definite population groups such as with the women inmates in Argentina. Individuals in lower socio-economic groups are more probable to experience chronic ill-health and expire earlier than those who have money. (Michael Weitzman, 2013)

Global health equity in health among population groups occur in all countries. These differences happen along several axes of social stratification comprising ethnic, socioeconomic, political, cultural and as debated by experts (Iain Barton, 2013). The causes of inequities may be different from those in developing nations. Health inequalities are often looked at along a social slope. This is saying that the more favorable your social circumstances for example income or education, the better your chance of appreciating longer life and much better health. While there is a huge gap between the wealthy and the poor, the relationship between social circumstances in health go hand in hand. (Iain Barton, 2013)Yet, in developing countries better-quality health among the city population has been discovered to be because of access to improved health care knowledge and services instead of greater wages. (Schenker, 2010)