Panellist Skarpeteig finds availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality as crucial for a rights-based health system
Panthers are usually found in the jungle or the zoo, but as Fellows of the Salzburg Global Seminar on ‘Realizing the Right to Health’ heard on Saturday morning, they also belong in the rights-based approach to health care delivery.
Speaking in the opening session of the day, Margot Skarpeteig, senior advisor at the Norwegian Agency for Development Co-operation, Norad, explained the seven components to a rights-based approach to development, which can also be applied to health:
•Participation – ensuring patients have a role in their own health care;
•Accountability for both governments and doctors;
•Non-discrimination – ensuring the delivery of health care to all, including the vulnerable;
•Transparency in the decision-making process;
•Human dignity – ensuring everyone is treated with respect of their cultural differences;
•Empowerment – ensuring patients are informed about their health care systems;
•Rule of law – ensuring all participants in the health care system deliver the right to health in accordance to legislation
A human rights approach to health care gives clear focus on the individual, not just the provision of medicine and hospitals, explained Skarpeteig. And a rights-based approach to health care also puts the focus on governments and their role. Are they actively working against people accessing their right to health, such as in the case of HIV-positive women in Kenya being forcibly sterilized? Are they just passive, such as failing to encourage girls’ education in Pakistan? Or do they simply not have enough resources?
To ensure their citizens can exercise their right to health, governments are obliged to ensure that health services and medicines are available – exist in sufficient quantity; accessible – affordable and offered to everyone; acceptable – taking into account cultural preferences; and of good quality.
Fulfil these criteria, and citizens will not only have their rights respected and protected, but fulfilled also.
