INTERNATIONAL GENEVA GLOBAL HEALTH PLATFORM

On World Health Day 2024, the World Health Organization (WHO) emphasised that access to health is a human right that must be available to people universally. While the strong inter-relationship between health and human rights is well recognised, stakeholders including the WHO recognise that more needs to be done to translate such universal claims into a lived reality of equitable and widely-accessible healthcare. Even more worryingly, widespread backsliding on human rights and the persistence of intersecting crises create concerns about negative fallouts for global health.

On the occasion of the Human Rights Platform's Annual Conference taking place on November 5th at the Geneva Graduate Institute, the Global Health Centre’s International Geneva Global Health Platform is pleased to invite Helena Nygren-Krug, Senior Advisor at UNAIDS, for a two-part podcast where we unpack the relationship between health and human rights and assess the challenges but also opportunities of this relationship in a changing global context.

In this second episode of our two-part podcast, we reflect on the mutual impacts of health and human rights in the context of current crises and their role in multilateral governance negotiations.

In this first episode, we discuss the essential links between health and human rights and examine the role of human rights in contemporary health politics.

Despite being there for many years, One Health has gained a lot of attention in the last year at the political level. With the new trends and changes appearing in health diplomacy, and the intersections with One Health, Katherine Urbáez talks about her research results and how diplomacy has been a tool for implementing new policies.

Postpartum haemorrhage (PPH) affects 1 in every 6 women giving birth and is the leading cause of maternal mortality globally. Death from PPH is largely preventable and has been nearly eliminated in high-income countries, yet women in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) continue to be disproportionately affected.

While policymakers at national levels struggle with this problem, a group of midwives in a remote mountain village in Indonesia solved the problem and have sustained zero maternal mortality continuously since 2015. They achieved this remarkable accomplishment using simple innovations, at zero cost.
We interviewed Maya Hidayati, the head midwife who spearheaded the effort, together with Anna Kurniati, Director of Workforce Deployment at the Indonesian Ministry of Health.