If there may be one space through which the notion of ‘post-pandemic’ ought to make sense, it’s the well being sector, write the editors of Esprit. In spite of everything, historical past reveals that well being crises deliver progress in public well being. However in France, the controversy has been gradual to take off.
The weaknesses within the system uncovered by COVID-19 have been there earlier than the pandemic: social and geographical inequalities in accessing healthcare; exhaustion amongst well being employees; psychological well being points amongst youthful generations significantly. And whereas the shock was largely absorbed, doubts stay: ‘It appears a very long time in the past that the French have been certain in having “the very best well being system on the planet”.
Attractivizing health-work
In a roundtable dialogue, top-level well being professionals deal with the essential query of tips on how to make the healthcare system extra engaging to professionals. Shortages in healthcare employees is a rising downside globally: the WHO predicts a shortfall of 18 million by 2030. The structural causes are advanced and various, from getting older populations to altering attitudes to work and shifting perceptions of healthcare. The professionalization of care and the introduction of extra economically environment friendly administration approaches have led to ‘an erosion of compassion’, making a ‘Weberian logic of “disenchantment”’.
In a post-COVID world the place versatile hours and distant working have grow to be the norm within the tertiary sector, the healthcare sector is struggling to retain disillusioned employees who need a greater work-life steadiness, higher pay, and fewer hierarchical working environments. Though ‘these calls for are broadly authentic, the hospital system was not constructed with them in thoughts and is struggling to adapt’. Measures have to be taken throughout society, with collective acceptance of the price of reorganizing healthcare and broad social measures to make healthcare professionals’ lives simpler, from cheaper lodging close to hospitals to 24-hour public transport serving healthcare amenities.
‘The will for flexibility have to be reconciled with the necessity for stability’ and continuity of care, by figuring out and correctly compensating employees in a position to do evening or weekend shifts and permitting others, for instance these with younger households, to be extra versatile. ‘Making public hospitals engaging to employees doesn’t imply returning to some hypothetical golden age: it means working collectively to establish and create the circumstances for “caring properly” within the twenty-first century.’
An apple a day…
Rémy Slama seems to be at one other side of healthcare: prevention. Well being is a product of a number of elements, however the system tends to focus narrowly on particular person points and ignore the first, environmental causes of illnesses. The result’s a wildly inefficient well being finances that prioritizes therapy, regardless of prevention being 3 times more economical on the inhabitants degree.
The combat towards local weather change represents a singular alternative to enhance public well being. For instance, a shift in direction of consuming extra greens and fewer meat and dairy would scale back each agricultural greenhouse gasoline emissions and among the most burdensome persistent illnesses, together with most cancers, heart problems and weight problems. The healthcare system itself is liable for 7–10 per cent of greenhouse gasoline emissions in France, largely due to the excessive carbon footprint of medicines and medical tools. Because of this, refocusing on prevention as a substitute of therapy would profit the setting in addition to bettering public well being in the long term.
The black ebook of Assad
Hamit Bozarslan critiques a significant new assortment on Syria underneath Assad: Syrie, le pays brûlé, edited by members of the collective Comité Syrie-Europe Après Alep. It locations Assad’s deliberate destruction of Syrian society in a long-term context, with a mix of in-depth evaluation, detailed surveys, eyewitness accounts, photographs, and poetry. Contributors name out the inaction of the West, which ‘shortly reconciled itself to the regime’s brutality’, and its far-reaching penalties – not least Russia’s full-scale conflict in Ukraine.
Many contributors emphasize that Syria shouldn’t be an remoted case: ‘“The civilizational malaise” of a rustic apparently outdoors our civilization is a “civilizational malaise” full cease’. Though ‘troublesome, harrowing, even painful to learn at instances’ writes Bozarslan, ‘this ebook is an important reference for Syrian historical past since 2011’.
Return of the nice man?
Blandine Chélini-Pont asks whether or not US can revive its position as ‘godfather of the free peoples and guarantor of worldwide guidelines’ by means of its help for Ukraine, or whether or not its ‘good man’ persona has been completely broken.
Rooted in its founding providential delusion and an unshakable religion within the inherent advantage of its structure, the US has at all times felt licensed to evangelise to different nations and to combine of their affairs. However Chélini-Pont’s overview of US international interventions all through the 20th and 21st centuries reveals a constant discrepancy between its ethical rhetoric and its actual motivations.
After a excessive level within the early twentieth century, when the US drove the event of a rights-based worldwide order that emphasised self-determination and worldwide legislation, the Chilly Battle noticed its ‘defence of rights and freedoms contaminated by the messianism of Soviet containment’. Violations of worldwide legislation have been justified by the mission of destabilizing the USSR, resulting in rising anti-US sentiment within the Eighties and in the end to the start of al-Qaeda, the conflict on terror, and the unlawful invasion of Iraq.
Regardless of profitable the Nobel Peace Prize, Barack Obama refused to behave towards Assad’s legal regime and prioritized financial relations with China over human rights abuses. However since February 2022, US ethical rhetoric has reinvented itself: ‘Russian anti-westernism is so intense that it’s smoothing over cultural divisions between Europe and the US,’ writes Chélini-Pont. Biden’s defiant stance towards Russia has made the US extra credible as an ethical power: ‘Not since Franklin D. Roosevelt has the US’s ethical stance corresponded so carefully with its guarantees.’
