How might global health master deadly sins and strive for greater virtues?

In the spirit of critical reflection, we examine how the field of global health might surmount current challenges and prioritize its ethical mandate, namely to achieve, for all people, equity in health. We use the parlance of mastering deadly sins and striving for greater virtues in an effort to review what is needed to transform global health action. Global health falls prey to four main temptations: coveting silo gains, lusting for technological solutions, leaving broad promises largely unfulfilled, and boasting of narrow successes. This necessitates a change of heart: to keep faith with the promise it made, global health requires a realignment of core values and a sharper focus on the primacy of relationships with the communities it serves. Based on the literature to date, we highlight six steps to re-orienting global health action. Articulating a coherent global health agenda will come from principled action, enacted through courage and prudence in decision-making to foster people-centered systems of care over the entire lifespan.

• Publication year

  2014

• Venue

  Global Health Action

• Publication date

  2014-03-28

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.3402/gha.v7.23411PMID 24685169PMCID 3970118
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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