People everywhere want—and deserve—good health. Yet we find ourselves facing a global health care crisis.
Access isn’t keeping up with demand. Costs continue to skyrocket. Treatment gets more attention than prevention. There are enormous differences by community and by country in the way health care is delivered.
If we’re going to meet the challenges of improving health and health care on an international scale, we will need focus and big ideas.
I’m very proud to work at an institution that has a long history of thinking big. More than a century ago, Mr. Johns Hopkins, a merchant and investor, made a bold promise to provide the finest medical research, teaching and patient care available. He left large endowments to found a hospital that was linked to a medical school, which in turn was part of a university.
This radical thinking—joining teaching, research and clinical care—established the concept of academic medicine that leading health institutions everywhere now embrace. Mr. Hopkins also had the far-reaching idea to insist that his namesake hospital would provide care to all—regardless of race, sex or faith.
Today, we at Johns Hopkins Medicine are as passionate as ever about continuing to search for better answers, better treatments, better discoveries for tomorrow. And we have expanded our founder’s vision—and its impact—by striving to provide more individuals with access to quality care, whether in their local communities or in our health system.
Johns Hopkins Medicine International (JHI), where I am president, has forged affiliations to improve health care in nearly 20 countries on five continents around the world. Our goal is to collaborate with international partners to improve the health and wellbeing of individuals in their local communities.
However, even as medicine advances worldwide, some people still need to travel overseas for complex and rare conditions. JHI now has one of the largest U.S. programs for delivering specialized, high-quality care to international patients who must travel for the care they need.
Many Voices Needed
Global Promise will be a space to share trailblazing ideas on how we can work together globally, leveraging the promise of academic medicine, to improve health and health care. Advancements in health care always come down to collaboration. In addition to enthusiasm and innovation, we’ll also need the buy-in and support of partners with diverse perspectives to address the most pressing global health challenges.
We invite you to join our discussions on how health providers and systems around the world can best embrace the universal goals of health care; the role of medical research; the best means for training and supporting doctors, nurses and other providers; the quality and safety of patient care; and methods to meet both acute and preventative needs effectively and efficiently.
The more hearts and minds working together, the better we’ll all do at developing and delivering high-quality medical treatments—and even more importantly, keeping people healthy in the first place. We look forward to hearing from you about topics or trends we should discuss to move us forward in our collective quest to improve the health of people and communities near and far.
