Interesting 'perspective' piece in The Lancet. Citation, extracts and comment from me below.
CITATION: Improving trustworthiness in global health
Conrad Keating
Perspectives, The art of medicine, Volume 404, Issue 10456p925-927, September 07, 2024
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01816-6/fulltext?dgcid=raven_jbs_etoc_email
EXTRACTS
'This is a dangerous time for global health, not least given widespread vaccine disinformation across social media, with the aim of undermining societal trust in life-saving vaccines.
'Evidently, questions of trust hinge on clear communication: we need a continued flow of information, and not to only address the public at a time of crisis.'
COMMENT
The priority is not to have 'a continued flow of information', but is more fundamental: to ensure that every person can have access to relevant, reliable healthcare information to protect their own health and the health of others, and that they can differentiate this from misinformation. This in turn depends on the integrity of the global evidence ecosystem. That ecosystem continues to be broken because it is poorly supported, poorly understood, and poorly coordinated.
Best wishes, Neil
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org
