Photo Journalism Project: Cuban Socialized Medicine
Hi Everyone, I know no one posted much this last semester, but I decided I wanted to try to get this HCSC site going again.
This slide show was my final project for a photo journalism study that I did while studying in Havana, Cuba last fall. My focus was on primary care doctors and how they perceive the Cuban health care system. I conducted interviews with about ten doctors, most extensively with two women who worked at a walk-in community clinic in down town Havana. This little clinic wasn’t very well equipped, but the doctors were very caring and interesting.
As an American, the macro organization of their primary health care system was fascinating. Primary care doctors are assigned a geographic area - two city blocks in this case. They had the name and address of each person in their area (from government tax info), and they were expected to care for all those people. From 8:00AM to about noon each week day they would see patients in the clinic, and after that they would go from house to house to try to find people who might need their services but that hadn’t made it to the clinic. In Cuba, it is the doctors responsibility, rather than the patient’s, to see that everyone gets cared for. Ultimately, I think this take on community medicine, where responsibility shifts towards those who are most likely to be able to cope with it, is the reason Cuba has better health indicators than the US despite drastic resource shortages.
I hope the pictures are interesting, and I’ve posted a few more to our flickr account if you’d like to look deeper. You are also welcome to read my imperfect paper or contact me at isaac.holeman [at] gmail [dot] com if you would like more of the juicy details.
cheers
Isaac