Good health!

¡Salud!
Directed by Connie Field
MEDICC, 2006


In the film !Salud! produced and directed by Academy Award nominee Connie Field (The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter; Freedom on My Mind) the case for a universal health care system particularly in the developing world is well put with many examples of where it is achieving results.

Prior to the 1959 revolution, Cuba was blighted with the diseases of poverty including malaria, gastroenteritis, respiratory infections and parasites. Children were dying from diarrhoea. Today Cuba's domestic health care system is described as world class by the World Health Organisation (life expectancy and infant mortality figures equal to the U.K.) and healthcare is freely available to all on the island. Cuban medicine is also innovative with the training of doctors in communities taking family and community based medicine to a new level.

The situation in Cuba prior to the revolution can today be found in many Latin and Central American and African countries, as the film illustrates. Cuba's International Health Program, which started in Algeria in 1963, has dispatched medical personnel around the globe wherever needed working in areas where sometimes the countries domestic medical staff have refused to go. There has even been some resistance in countries such as Honduras and Venezuela who have seen these doctors as a threat to their privileged position.

Conversely the model of healthcare offered by Cuba fits well with the needs of the developing nations. The point is made in the film that universal healthcare of the type we are used to in Britain may not transplant exactly to less developed nations and a model such as Cuba with its much more community based emphasis might work better. There is certainly plenty of evidence in the film to support this. The issue of rurality features heavily and the community approach seems to work very well here.

One of the most exciting developments in the film is in Venezuela where micro medical schools have been established in the barrios, training doctors to work where traditional Venezuelan doctors would not go. These facilities not only train doctors but provide medical care where it is needed. This is part of the Mission Barrio Adentro public health program providing primary care, diagnosis and treatment, seeking to guarantee universal health care to the citizens of Venezuela.

To conclude, as Dr Paul Farmer Professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School says: the central question is whether health care should be a right or a commodity. This film makes a strong contemporary case that it should be a right and the way to guarantee that right is through a socialised universal public health and medical system. All in all this is a very informative film and would make an ideal viewing and teaching resource for both medical and nursing students as well as others in the public health field, particularly those with an interest in developing nations.

Graham Kirkwood works at the Centre for International Public Health Policy, University of Edinburgh
Email graham.kirkwood@ed.ac.uk

See more
¡Salud! (2006) MEDICC at http://www.saludthefilm.net/ns/main.html

Copyright
Copyright for this work is held jointly between Graham Kirkwood and the International Journal of Cuban Studies under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative 3.0 Licence

IJCS Volume 1 Issue 1 June 2008