Reading Summary

Steeven Toor
February 1st

This weeks reading focused on global health partnership, ethics and capacity
building. For the first two papers focused on capacity building, and the first
paper concentrated on capacity building specifically for health research in
developing countries. This paper addresses how you should approach
capacity building, with goals such as defining and prioritizing problems
systematically, scientifically evaluate appropriate solutions and share and
apply the knowledge generated. The reading defines that research capacity
building requires an enabling environment, and defines an enabling
environment as leadership, career structure, critical mass, infrastructure,
information access and interfaces between research producers and users.
From this reading I really got the feel that they wanted to bring across a
message on how we need to empower individuals and institutions/nations to
engage in this capacity building process. That its not just an individualistic or
a societal level issue, its a combination of both. Having partnerships in place
that focus on both a micro and macro level scale would be beneficial when
targeting issues in low-middle income countries such as inequitable access
and the reading also mentions the lack of engagement within research
communities. The reading also sets out that we need stronger leadership and
strategic planning along with other areas of focus when capacity building for
health research in the developing world. The next reading was similar to the
first one as it also looked at capacity building, but specifically focused on
Africa. This reading also looked at partnerships that already exist and how
these partnerships can sometimes be counterproductive and how we can
address this in the future. The main take away from this reading for me were
that often times there are pressures of publish or perish put on high
income country researchers and that the focus shouldnt be on who can
publish the most (while publishing is important) but rather on working with
the African partners and transferring research skills and helping establish a
sustainable health research program in Africa. The following reading focused
on global health ethics for students and how medical students and trainees
within the field of global health research lack ethical guidelines. I was able to
understand this paper as it made sense how there is a need for having
adequate and appropriate training so that students are equipped with the
knowledge and skills when facing ethical considerations in the actual field.
So before trainees are being sent into the field they have the conceptual
understanding and framework with ethical guidelines for how to approach
global health research. The reading also touches on principles that should be
focused on, such as social justice and humility, that should be highlighted in
the training for students going into the field. The last reading looked at
developing a toolkit that that focused on partnership assessments, and was
created by the Canadian coalition for global health research. What really
stood out for me from this paper was the frequently asked questions portion
of the paper in the beginning just after the preambles. Usually with papers
you are used to reading abstracts and such things before divulging into the
actual article itself. This was a neat way to Segway into the actual toolkit I
thought, and then the toolkit was well thoughout as well with a literature
review leading to identifying some of the challenges and risks of
partnerships. From here the 11 swiss principles were touched upon, following
the RAWOO principles and then finally the Costello and Zumla principles.