Using Access Healthcare Identify Potential Problem Critically Analyze Explain Assessing Context a Specific Organization

Access to Healthcare

There are a number of root causes for the global issue of lack of health care. The big ones relate to the fact that the world is still building its health care capacity, starting from a point pre-industrialization of very few people having access. This problem is compounded by a rapidly-growing population that it many parts of the world makes it almost impossible to keep up with infrastructure even when the money is there. That said, two major issues that are constraining the ability to governments to increase access to health care. These issues are spending on health care and the number of physicians.

Access to Health Care highlights these two issues. Health care spending, the site notes, is subject to great disparity between the wealthy nations and the non-wealthy nations. Health care spending, they note, is 4500 times higher in the top 5% of the world's population (by wealth) than it is for the lowest 20%. Even with this spending, there is uneven access to health care. For example, the country that spends the most on health care is the United States and there are millions of Americans either with no access to health care or with substandard health care.

In the developing world, there is a lack of infrastructure and that is also a matter for spending. Governments lack the fiscal capacity to make massive investments in health care, and private entities often face a market that is unable to pay for private health care. The result is that many parts of the developing world have either high end hospitals for the wealthy and a smattering of woefully underfunded clinics for the rest of the populace.

This can also relate to political instability, where infrastructure is damaged. Also, it needs to be studied whether the cause of physician shortfall relates to lack of training supply or an issue of emigration, where the talented doctors are leaving the country for better opportunities elsewhere. The global shortage of physicians allows for opportunities for physicians to move, which creates problems in the countries that can least afford to pay physicians a good wage.

Having money is only one problem. Access to Health Care identifies that there is a global shortage of physicians, and that this shortage is acute in the developing world. Training physicians is a long, complex process and the job requires a high level of intelligence and ability to learn. Moreover, where physicians are responsible for their own training, the costs are high and must be recouped. The AHC site note that industrialized nations have higher physician density than non-industrial, but wealth is not the only component of physician density. Educational infrastructure is critical, and the former USSR nations that benefitted from Soviet training have the highest physician densities in the world.

AHC also notes that in many countries there are other providers beyond doctors that assist in health care provision, but that investment levels are still low. The result is that there are incredible disparities in health care access between countries in the world.

For a specific organization, the remedies to the problem lie in working to improve the structural conditions that either constrains physician training, or investment in health care infrastructure. In some cases, awareness of the problem can improve the efforts of politicians to make improvements. For the organization, it is important to understand how these different issues can be addressed. A lack of physicians may relate to lack of investment capital, so there is a point where the two issues are combined.