What is global health?
The world recently received an urgent reminder about the importance of investing in global health. Before 2020, there had been many global health emergencies, including the HIV pandemic from the 1980s onwards, SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) in 2002 and the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
However, when COVID-19 was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern in March 2020, global health was brought to the forefront. We all became witnesses to a global health threat that affected the entire world.
COVID-19 highlighted the importance of cross-border collaboration, effective communication and strong leadership from global, regional and national organisations.
However, global health issues go far beyond the pandemic. Global health can encompass a range of past and present issues, including growing health disparities, the continued spread of HIV, climate change, migration-related health problems and more.
In this article, we examine what global health is, how it differs from public health and what career paths are available in this high impact field.
What is global health?
Global health is an area of research and practice that addresses cross-border health challenges and helps reduce health disparities worldwide.
The definition of global health is relatively modern. It was first coined in the 1940s and has been increasingly debated in the past two decades.
In a widely publicised paper in 2009, Professor Kaplan and colleagues described how global health concepts had derived from public health and international health, which evolved from hygiene and tropical medicine.
They defined global health as "an area for study, research and practice that places a priority on improving health and achieving equity in health for all people worldwide”.
Over the years, the principles of global health have evolved to include:
- Better understanding of the global health threats that affect everyone regardless of where we live.
- Improving health equity for all people by preventing avoidable disease, disability and death.
- Ranging from population-based prevention to individual clinical care.
- Alliances between a variety of groups and organisations that provide different knowledge and capabilities.
- The impacts of climate change on global health.
What is the difference between global health and public health?
Global health and public health have different focuses but do intersect.
While global health concepts look at health on a worldwide scale, public health considers the health of a particular community or country. Both aim to improve the health of the population through public health strategies such as vaccination, education, resource allocation and policies.
COVID-19 is a recent example of how global health and public health can be interrelated. The pandemic was a global health threat that impacted everyone. However, the way Australia responded to it was our public health response.
Every country around the world had a different public health response because of factors such as population, politics, geography and the economy.
While the principles of global health are focused on solutions that might require cooperation between countries, public health is generally focused on individual countries.
Public health has similar goals of health equity, prevention and coordination between organisations and groups, but the focus is on a nation or a population group within that nation.
What are the critical challenges in global health?
There are many current critical challenges in global health. Some of these include:
Communicable diseases
Emerging infectious diseases such as COVID-19 continue to pose significant threats. However, the world has long been managing the global public health threats of other communicable diseases like HIV and malaria.
There were estimated to be 39.9 million people living with HIV at the end of 2023, with transmission ongoing in all countries globally. In 2022, there were about 249 million malaria cases across the world, with 608,000 malaria deaths in 85 countries.
Non-communicable diseases
There are global public health threats from non-communicable diseases, too, such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, representing 32 per cent of global deaths in 2019. Diabetes has risen to become a leading cause of global ill health, impacting 830 million people in 2022, up from 200 million in 1990.
Health inequities in low-income regions and countries
While communicable and non-communicable diseases impact people in countries around the world, they affect low-income countries more.
For example:
- Globally, 65 per cent of people living with HIV live in Africa
- In 2022, 94 per cent of malaria cases and 95 per cent of malaria deaths were in Africa.
- More than three-quarters of cardiovascular deaths are in low- and middle-income countries.
- Diabetes has been rising more rapidly in low- and middle-income countries where treatment coverage is lowest.
What is Australia's role in addressing global health issues?
As a high income country, Australia has a responsibility to contribute to global health challenges. Our support can complement our own public health programs to help improve health both here and overseas.
Australia works at national, regional and global levels to address shared health challenges such as the health impacts of climate change, the risk of pandemics and antimicrobial resistance.
For example, Australia’s global health commitments are broad and include:
- Contributing to the World Health Organization (WHO) and working closely to strengthen health outcomes in our region.
- Providing support for over 20 countries across the Pacific and Southeast Asia, including the Solomon Islands, Indonesia, Timor-Leste and Vanuatu.
- Contributing to programs to help eradicate HIV, tuberculosis and malaria in our region.
- Vaccine equity programs
- Pandemic preparedness programs
- Helping countries in the region avoid and contain infectious disease threats with the Indo-Pacific Centre for Health Security.
- Providing scholarships for students from partner countries to study health-related courses at Australian universities. One Papua New Guinean student is now working towards eliminating malaria in her country thanks to the Trilateral Malaria Project (TMP), a cooperation between Australia, China and Papua New Guinea.
What is the importance of global health collaboration?
No country, institution or organisation can prevent, prepare for and respond to global health challenges alone. There needs to be collaboration between governments, global health organisations and non-government organisations (NGOs).
Australia partners with many key multilateral organisations and global health initiatives, including the United Nations (UN), WHO, UNICEF, the World Bank Group and several NGOs.
Collaboration is crucial because it can help organisations share information and build capacity in low-resource settings.
For example, since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, more than a third of Ukrainians had to flee their homes, and many NGOs joined with the Ukrainian government and local organisations to help provide aid.
Help has included emergency supplies distributed by many NGOs, including humanitarian organisations like CARE, Project HOPE and the Ukrainian Humanitarian Fund.
These organisations have provided emergency aid, medical equipment, food and helped displaced people move to safer areas.
Career paths in global health
Global health is an area that has changed significantly in recent years. According to the 2024 Global Health Care Outlook report, there is a severe shortage of workers in the global healthcare sector.
This means global health leaders have an important job in rebuilding the industry and restoring trust, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic.
There are many roles to consider in global health leadership. Careers range from community health workers and human rights advocacy all the way to health management. There are also global health roles in research, education and policy analysis.
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