May 18, 2022·edited May 18, 2022Liked by Jessica Ocean
I definitely want to offer encouragement. I've been inspired by this project because you seem to be actually trying to solve the problem, rather than just going through the motions of following an approved path. And you're trying to do something so humane in a system that sounds unhumane.
It goes into the history of the evidence-based medicine movement and traces the scientific and political currents that enabled NICE to get set up, including the individuals who contributed to making it happen. Seems to be a good example of lasting change to a sociopolitical system.
Another role model is Paul Farmer and his nonprofit Partners in Health. He started it to provide healthcare in rural Haiti, and it has expanded to be providing healthcare in several locations in the developing world. Farmer himself became very prominent in global health.
I think he's relevant to your work because his philosophy was very much against cost-effectiveness focussed interventions in global health. Instead he emphasised the idea of accompaniment, which he described as follows: "To accompany someone, is to go somewhere with him or her, to break bread together, to be present on a journey with a beginning and an end…There’s an element of mystery and openness….I’ll share your fate for awhile, and by ‘awhile’ I don’t mean ‘a little while.’ Accompaniment is much more often about sticking with a task until it’s deemed completed by the person or person being accompanied, rather than by the accompagnateur."
I definitely want to offer encouragement. I've been inspired by this project because you seem to be actually trying to solve the problem, rather than just going through the motions of following an approved path. And you're trying to do something so humane in a system that sounds unhumane.
Some possible role models:
NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) - the UK body that publishes evidence-based health guidance for the NHS to use. There is a case study of its history here: https://www.idsihealth.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/A-TERRIBLE-BEAUTY_resize.pdf
It goes into the history of the evidence-based medicine movement and traces the scientific and political currents that enabled NICE to get set up, including the individuals who contributed to making it happen. Seems to be a good example of lasting change to a sociopolitical system.
Another role model is Paul Farmer and his nonprofit Partners in Health. He started it to provide healthcare in rural Haiti, and it has expanded to be providing healthcare in several locations in the developing world. Farmer himself became very prominent in global health.
I think he's relevant to your work because his philosophy was very much against cost-effectiveness focussed interventions in global health. Instead he emphasised the idea of accompaniment, which he described as follows: "To accompany someone, is to go somewhere with him or her, to break bread together, to be present on a journey with a beginning and an end…There’s an element of mystery and openness….I’ll share your fate for awhile, and by ‘awhile’ I don’t mean ‘a little while.’ Accompaniment is much more often about sticking with a task until it’s deemed completed by the person or person being accompanied, rather than by the accompagnateur."
This talk gives a bit of a flavour of him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uI5mouRRaEw
Also this post on the spread of study circles in Sweden might be a good case study of a peer-to-peer model that actually scaled: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tjxgbovwc5Ft7wrtc/popular-education-in-sweden-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-1