A Message from Ted Karpf
CGCM Colleagues
For two years I have been working to bring a new course based on missions work in the HIV/AIDS to STH. This spring it has happened. The advert is below. More importantly, this is the first course with a critical international public health component and one which is field tested in missions round the world. Values and practices is based on my foundational work with the Ford Foundation and WHO on Decent Care. It will look at health and health systems and give a sense of how to understand what is happening in systems and what can change for the patient and family in that system. By enacting agency every one of us can be the manager of our own health care. For those of us in missions it is crucial to understand how each of us can have a say in what happens to people in health care encounters. The course will be driven the class itself with reasonable reading assignments and paper by midterm. The final will be the writing of an Op Ed piece, max 750 words. That should lighten the end of year issues, all to be done before finals week. Cannot figure out how to do this any better. It is a first-run course and we will learn from each other how best to make this work. So I hope you will consider signing up.
Best Always
Ted+
Course Description
Important theoretical and practical issues related to cross-cultural, governmental and nongovernmental and faith-based service work related to the practice of *Decent Care and its application in developing healthy communities will be surveyed.
Structured according a developmental approach to health and health systems, students will be encouraged to think critically about and experience the application of values and assumptions undergirding health systems and structures of such service work as currently envisioned and practiced.
Case studies, guest speakers, and multimedia offerings will enrich the context of informed disciplinary and cross disciplinary approaches.
*Decent Care is a concept developed in the World Health Organization by the instructor. Decent Care bases the planning, delivery and evaluation of care on values that place individuals, in their social and cultural contexts, at the center of the caring process. The aims of decent care are to develop health systems around the primacy of persons in their own health care, and to build a bridge between the principles of human rights and the practice of medicine. By listening to and honoring the voices of the people care processes and models can be developed that respond to the needs of a community enabling human flourishing.