Going through the following questions may give you a clue…
Do you engage in any of the following?:
- Advancing people’s health rights, be it in Primary Health Care, in patients rights or in equitable access to treatment?
- Having employers’ taking responsibility to protect workers’ health?
- Resisting and opposing the known damaging health impacts of globalization?
- Resisting moves towards privatization of essential health services?
- Protecting the rights of people living with HIV and AIDS?
Do you contribute to bring power to the people through any of the following?:
- Strengthening people’s voices in decision-making through organizing and uniting beneficiaries and through building their political consciousness?
- Promoting a vision of health guided by goals for Health For All as a right?
- Challenging the current paths of globalization by engaging in the struggles over trade policies (e.g., GATS, TRIPS) and over global policies and practices affecting the health of the poor?
- Advancing health rights at the national political level and directly engaging on health issues at the local level?
- Advancing health by participating in the struggles over income and employment, food security, poverty and discrimination?
- Supporting the informal economy as an important income generator for the poor?
- Denouncing the negative impact of corporate practices and commercial interests in health?
- Denouncing the privatization attempts of essential public services (water, sanitation, health care, electricity) and the lack of access of the poor to the same public services?
- Denouncing public-private partnerships that give undue weight to the private sector in decision-making in the public domain?
- Advocating for grater real beneficiaries’ participation thus fostering greater transparency and accountability in the decision-making over the use of resources for health?
Do you directly engage yourself in health issues in the interest of equity, justice and health rights:
- By getting involved in the struggle over equity in general and over gender equality in particular, especially in response to the HIV and AIDS pandemic (including access to treatment, home care and ancillary services)?
- By demanding trans-national corporate responsibility in regards to health and nutrition issues and to safe working conditions worldwide?
- By monitoring and denouncing injustices in the distribution, migration of and investment in health workers and in the protection of their working conditions?
- By demanding greater investment in the public sector health services?
- By supporting the incorporation of traditional health services into PHC?
- By struggling for universal access to quality health care and to PHC?
- By getting involved in the protection of poor households from inequitable cost burdens related to their health and health care?
- By actively promoting public literacy in health, in health systems and in treatment alternatives?
Do you regularly get involved in discussions with health workers, traditional health workers, rural, urban and minority civil society members and with labor unions in processes related to health and welfare?
Do you work with others in fostering a unified and shared analysis that can lead to shared goals and strategies in the area of health as a right?
Do you get involved in strategies and campaigns related to all the above, and in building common tactical platforms by identifying key common opportunities and critical constraints, as well as major strategic allies and opponents?
Does whatever you do of the above lead to agreements on mechanisms and actions to:
Strengthen linkages and build networks?
Empower beneficiaries?
Encourage the sharing of resources? and
Prioritize solidarity action?
(*): This quiz is to be graded by each of you in private consultation with your own self.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City