systemic change

Trust me, beloved friends, when I say that the past few days have afforded me the opportunity to link, somewhat intricately, my impressions of the ongoing climate change summit in Copenhagen with my long-running musings about mHealth and the “cloud”.

I wished though that I could also say that this intricately forged link is a positive one. Alas, negativity seems to prevail.

The whole tortuous process began last month when I began preparations to participate in a series of workshops and seminars about the course of eHealth in Africa. As I read up on the travails of telemedicine in Southern Africa in the 1980s and pondered the fact that—all the highfalutin bromides notwithstanding—for most African practitioners and patients, what counts for telemedicine most of the time is the house officer (junior doctor) using his mobile phone to communicate between wards and to deliver dosage instructions to support staff because the official land line has long ago ceased to function, the climate change conference was building its crescendo. Then Bush House wrote.