Reasons for the Programme
This programme emerged from two contemplations
We are experiencing complex and multiple poor health outcomes due to the deliberate and innumerable crises created by extractive economic systems. These crises create more crises as well as amplify current ones. For example, Gaza was already experiencing drought and multiple other ecological challenges due to planetary dysregulation and contamination spearheaded by Israeli occupation(source). Now, the Peoples of Gaza have to content with ecocide alongside their genocide, which is creating a transgenerational polycrisis. Simultaneously, the Peoples of Gaza now have to confront these deliberate and multiple crises with an ever debilitating infrastructure, including the death of doctors, engineers, scientists, liberators, and so on. This left us with the following questions;
How does the polycrisis affect human health outcomes?
Do we have the knowledges, tools, and cognitive ability to comprehend the phenomena we are facing? Or do we need to build new knowledge pathways?
Can justice education for healthcare workers help us create health practices that function within the current context?
In the U.K. we are yet to directly face the violence of war, however, we are facing displacement due to planetary dysregulation, increasing mental and physical health crises due to austerity, and the threat of another pandemic. This is being met with an increasingly defunded and thus collapsing healthcare system. The inevitable and deliberate collapse of the National Healthcare Service will disproportionately increase the poor health outcomes of racialised and marginalised peoples, who already experience medical violence, gaslighting and denial of care in the NHS. We therefore need to build new pathways for healing that start at the community level and move upstream to healthcare systems. This contemplation leads to the following questions;
What is the intersection between health justice and healthcare?
How do we practise community primary care and how does it join with healthcare systems?
What tools and knowledges do we need to acquire to mitigate the harm from the collapsing healthcare system?
From the programme co-lead, Rhiannon:
Health has been captured as a tool for the elite and capitalism, through individualism and eugenics, but when reclaimed it is a powerful tool for liberation.
Health workers are isolated from each other and community, encouraged to be apolitical and not allowed to develop the radical analysis which health justice brings.
Our health systems are not serving us, they are violent, individualistic, lacking in many adequate tools, and increasingly privatised, underfunded and surveilled, we need to be able to challenge medical violence from within these systems but also develop new and learn from historical examples of collective healing practices.