If there’s one space during which the notion of ‘post-pandemic’ ought to make sense, it’s the well being sector, write the editors of Esprit. In any case, historical past exhibits that well being crises carry 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 staff; psychological well being points amongst youthful generations notably. And whereas the shock was largely absorbed, doubts stay: ‘It appears a very long time in the past that the French have been positive in having “the perfect well being system on the earth”.
Attractivizing health-work
In a roundtable dialogue, top-level well being professionals deal with the essential query of methods to make the healthcare system extra enticing to professionals. Shortages in healthcare employees is a rising drawback globally: the WHO predicts a shortfall of 18 million by 2030. The structural causes are complicated and assorted, from getting old 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 turn into the norm within the tertiary sector, the healthcare sector is struggling to retain disillusioned staff 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 should 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 need for flexibility should be reconciled with the necessity for stability’ and continuity of care, by figuring out and correctly compensating staff capable of do night time or weekend shifts and permitting others, for instance these with younger households, to be extra versatile. ‘Making public hospitals enticing to employees doesn’t imply returning to some hypothetical golden age: it means working collectively to establish and create the situations for “caring properly” within the twenty-first century.’
An apple a day…
Rémy Slama seems at one other facet of healthcare: prevention. Well being is a product of a number of elements, however the system tends to focus narrowly on particular person facets and ignore the first, environmental causes of ailments. The result’s a wildly inefficient well being finances that prioritizes therapy, regardless of prevention being thrice more economical on the inhabitants degree.
The battle in opposition to 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 cut back each agricultural greenhouse fuel emissions and a few of the most burdensome power ailments, together with most cancers, heart problems and weight problems. The healthcare system itself is chargeable for 7–10 per cent of greenhouse fuel emissions in France, largely due to the excessive carbon footprint of medicines and medical gear. Consequently, refocusing on prevention as a substitute of therapy would profit the surroundings in addition to bettering public well being in the long term.
The black e-book of Assad
Hamit Bozarslan evaluations a serious 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, pictures, 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 battle in Ukraine.
Many contributors emphasize that Syria just isn’t an remoted case: ‘“The civilizational malaise” of a rustic apparently outdoors our civilization is a “civilizational malaise” full cease’. Though ‘tough, harrowing, even painful to learn at occasions’ writes Bozarslan, ‘this e-book is a vital reference for Syrian historical past since 2011’.
Return of the great man?
Blandine Chélini-Pont asks whether or not US can revive its position as ‘godfather of the free peoples and guarantor of worldwide guidelines’ via its assist for Ukraine, or whether or not its ‘good man’ persona has been completely broken.
Rooted in its founding providential fantasy and an unshakable religion within the inherent advantage of its structure, the US has all the time felt approved to evangelise to different nations and to combine of their affairs. However Chélini-Pont’s overview of US overseas interventions all through the 20th and 21st centuries exhibits 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 regulation, the Chilly Warfare noticed its ‘defence of rights and freedoms contaminated by the messianism of Soviet containment’. Violations of worldwide regulation have been justified by the mission of destabilizing the USSR, resulting in rising anti-US sentiment within the Eighties and finally to the delivery of al-Qaeda, the battle on terror, and the unlawful invasion of Iraq.
Regardless of profitable the Nobel Peace Prize, Barack Obama refused to behave in opposition to 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 in opposition to Russia has made the US extra credible as an ethical drive: ‘Not since Franklin D. Roosevelt has the US’s ethical stance corresponded so intently with its guarantees.’
