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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Recorded presentation

Jennifer Kasper, MD, MPH, Southwest Emergency Associates, Tucson Medical Center, 5301 East Grant Road, Tucson, AZ 85712, 520-324-1922, jkasper66@yahoo.com

Doctors for Global Health (DGH) accompanies marginalized communities in many countries, including El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Peru, Argentina, Mexico, and Uganda. DGH practices liberation medicine, “the conscious and conscientious use of health to promote human dignity and social justice,” and accompaniment, working with the community, not doing things to or for it. We believe, as Paulo Freire wrote, that the people most capable of understanding an oppressive society and working to change it are the oppressed themselves. Community members actively participate, articulate their reality, and determine their needs and priorities. Our activities include: strengthening existing health care infrastructure; training health promoters; helping people complete formal education; creating cooperatives and microenterprise; constructing clinics and childcare centers; and supporting the formation of local organizations. We incorporate right to health principles in all aspects of our work. Volunteers must possess knowledge of human rights principles, and the historical, political, and socioeconomic underpinnings of the countries where DGH works. Our project committee seeks to apply a human rights framework to monitoring and evaluating projects and creating measures for the attainment of a collective vision of social justice. Our advocacy efforts related to the right to health occur at the individual, community, national, and international levels. DGH plays an active role in the People's Health Movement, a network of grassroots organizations whose mandate is Health for All NOW. DGH strives for synergy in its in-country, organizational, and advocacy work.

Learning Objectives:

• Articulate one model of how the right to health and other human rights can be realized in a participatory, empowering way through the accompaniment of communities.
• Describe benchmarks and indicators used by DGH to measure the attainment of the right to health in its community projects.

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No

Recorded presentation