Third World Experiences in Health Planning

Abstract

First the paper deals with the legacy of broad social teaching resulting from the years of international collaboration from the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt to that of Richard Nixon. Public health problems, whether new or old, are essentially social in character and can only be solved in terms of social policy. Attention is directed to the current mistake of placing the emphasis on individual behavior, divorced from its social base, in the work of health professionals serving in Third World countries. The value and limitation of indicators are discussed against this background. The weakness of national average values and the consequent need of measuring the differentials between social groups and classes are widely illustrated. Finally, positive and negative lessons learned by experimenting with health technology consistent with the expected development of countries are examined as a basis for a genuinely emancipatory approach to the health problems in the Third World.