Ray Moynihan, author and Senior Research Fellow at Bond University, has identified ten reasons for optimism about the future of healthcare in his regular BMJ column, including the greening movement, and increasing focus on the social and environmental determinants of health.
Have the scents of spring gone to his head? Or is he onto something? Let him know what you think….
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Is healthcare undergoing a radical renewal?
Ray Moynihan writes:
Forgive the unbridled optimism – blame it on the spring – but sometimes one has to look on the bright side. Working as an investigative journalist in the dirty business of medicine for more than a decade, it’s understandable you might experience the odd bout of jaundice, even pessimism.
But as many Croakey regulars would know, there is much to celebrate in the wild ever-changing and chaotic world of health and medicine.
In my latest column, now on the BMJ site, I point to ten streams of change in healthcare which may ultimately coalesce into a coherent vision of radical renewal.
The dream is that the currentmedical-industrial paradigm- fragmented, technocratic, mechanistic, inhuman, and imperial – will be replaced by a holistic, humane, independent and sustainable system that has a whole new approach to conceiving of illness, and defining who’s sick.
The medicalisation of risk – turning healthy populations into patients and subsidising the mega-profits of the industries feeding off it – is under increasing scrutiny, though there is much work to be done envisaging the nature of a fundamentally different paradigm.
If you’d like to read the BMJ piece, share it or trash it, the full text is free here.
