Your Place, Your Space

Keeping it simple for oxygen coordination is best accomplished when we're welcomed in.  It’s good to support global leadership in medical oxygen supply management for underserved communities and countries in need.  It’s great to support efforts that strengthen individual country leadership toward national strategies on medical oxygen supply management.   Both require some tread into a country’s vulnerabilities on medical needs.  Let’s tread meaningfully and in a way that assures a welcome back.  Detail the coordinating agencies or government departments responsible for medical oxygen supply receipt. Meet with health administrators.  Detail a country’s current policies, compare with a global review and detail opportunities for policies on oxygen management. Is medical oxygen supply and/or maintenance an ongoing regulatory component within a country? What would it take to sharpen regulatory efforts? Is medical oxygen supply a component to ongoing emergen...

Mortality data accuracy is a cornerstone of pandemic management, and it is a cornerstone of any health issue. COVID data inaccuracy offers tremendous opportunity to improve healthcare epidemiology sustainably. And we can improve only when welcomed into one another's national space and place.   Mortality accuracy is challenging due to statistical logistics and geopolitics; it is also challenging due to sociocultural considerations.  We don't really know how each affects accuracy of the mortality data . We don't know the weight of each consideration because we haven't properly assessed them.   We have addressed some solutions for statistical logistics with COVID, such as improving real time data, use of EHR, use of cemetery and cremation data, use of excess death or other metrics, consistency to death definitions and strengthened regional epidemiology.  We have addressed few solutions for geopolitics related to COVID. Most solutions rely on normalizing the ex...

  Building better for current and future pandemics seems reasonable, and doable.  Yet managing pandemics also seemed reasonable and doable during the decades of funded planning in the United States. Funding supported to thwart bioterrorism, by the way.  So the main lesson learned from these first years of a fresh pandemic should incorporate a way to circumvent false assurances and reliance on planners.  And how do we move on from planning? Doing.  If the World Health Organization recommends building better and getting sustainable development back on track , do so. Don’t continue to plan, just do. And do it with LMIC partnership in their place and space.  Let’s energize this doable move with COVID vaccine and therapeutics. When the vaccines, therapeutics and supplies are delivered to countries, particularly low and middle income (LMIC) countries, are they delivered to credentialed labor supply? How is the labor credentialing assured across borders? How is la...

 Meet people where they are.  Immunization is a cornerstone of public health and vaccination is an investment for the individual.  The cornerstone is fractured when there is incongruence between medicine and public health.  The investment is fractured when there is a disconnect between the individual and the public. Repair the fractured cornerstone. Be professional with the professional credentials handed. In a functioning, interdependent system, we would rely on scientific expertise for research and development of a tool, we would rely on medical expertise and diagnosticians to assess appropriateness of this tool to the individual, and we would rely on public health experts to bring the tool to people - where they are. We do not have a functioning, interdependent system in a world of discourse and inconsistent application of scientific concepts. While we cannot control the external energy, we can control how we meet people where they are.  We should set expecta...