{"id":16764,"date":"2014-10-30T16:23:56","date_gmt":"2014-10-30T20:23:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pmedicine.org\/epatients\/?p=16764"},"modified":"2014-10-31T14:16:06","modified_gmt":"2014-10-31T18:16:06","slug":"spm-at-who","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/participatorymedicine.org\/epatients\/2014\/10\/spm-at-who.html","title":{"rendered":"WHO in Geneva – SPM in the house!"},"content":{"rendered":"

SPM member Casey Quinlan (who’s posting this) was\u00a0invited to attend an event at the WHO in Geneva. This post originally appeared on her Mighty Casey Media blog, and is reposted here in its entirety by SPM request.<\/em><\/p>\n

Guess who got invited to WHO? No, really.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0World Health Organization<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(WHO) invited yours truly to its First Global Experts\u2019 Consultation in service of building a WHO framework for patient and family engagement. This is all due to my part in the ongoing anvil chorus that is the new\u00a0Patient & Family Engagement Roadmap<\/a><\/strong>, developed by a group of dedicated folks from all parts of the healthcare compass over the last couple years, with funding from the\u00a0Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"WHO_signs\"I spent just over two days in Geneva, most of the time head-down in discussions about how the global health system \u2013 a patchwork of services delivered by an even patchwork-ier cadre of healthcare delivery systems \u2013 can better serve the needs of the people\/patients who seek medical care and health information from them.<\/p>\n

This post will not attempt to report everything I saw\/heard\/thought\/felt in that jam-packed 16 hours of ideas and outlooks. What I\u2019ll share is my perspective on the challenges, the opportunities, the pitfalls, and the hopes that \u2013 in my view, at least \u2013 emerged during that lightning round of global spitballing.<\/p>\n

Challenges<\/h3>\n

There\u2019s an old joke that asks, \u201cWhat\u2019s an elephant?\u201d The answer: \u201cA mouse designed by a government committee.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the risk, and challenge, to any attempt\u00a0to build a definable set of standards for a human effort. Education, transportation, trade, infrastructure, communication, medicine \u2013 all require some sort of standardization to make them useful to more than one or two people huddled over a campfire. A study of history will show that as much as we humans are great idea generators, trying to get the rest of the tribe to adopt our new idea isn\u2019t easy.<\/p>\n

The father of quantum mechanics, Max Planck, said it best: \u201cA new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.\u201d To paraphrase:\u00a0Science advances one funeral at a time.<\/p>\n

Medicine, which has been practiced for millennia by magical beings initiated into secrets of \u201cscience\u201d that could not be understood by the common human, has only become understandable to the average Joe and\/or Jane as public education has become available across the globe. Public education still isn\u2019t available everywhere, and the character and content of that education can be complicated by cultural views of science, of the education of women, and other factors that impact access to information.<\/p>\n

So the challenges I see here are two-fold:<\/p>\n