Global Health Council Meeting

Whoever first said 'timing is everything' had it right when it comes to my first weeks at PSI. To help with my orientation to the new work, the Global Health Council annual conference was in DC last week. Lots of time spent sitting in on sessions, seeing old friends, and making new ones. The first thing to know about the GHC meeting: it is the gathering for the international health 'industry' - meaning the donor agencies and their contractors are the major supporters of, and presenters at, the meeting. You get the inside view including sessions on the funding priorities in the US Congress and early looks at the reauthorization of PEPFAR.

One workshop I did make a point to sit in on was the one on Social Marketing led by Sureyya E. Hornston from the CDC. Sureyya and I first met and worked together several years ago when CDC began its Syphilis Elimination Effort. What was most interesting to me was that a session predicted to have 20-25 attendees wound up with an SRO, into the hallways, crowd.  She covered the social marketing framework as I do here, and added a section on using behavioral theories when doing the work. We had a number of good exchanges and the 2 hours went by very quickly. I was impressed that no one in the session asked 'where's the product?' as she relentlessly focused on behavior change as the important outcome for social marketing efforts (yea Surreya!). Now if we can move that position more front and center for more of the international community.

Another session presented data from a partnership effort to integrate family planning and HIV services. The three notes for me were:

• The conclusion (again?) that partnerships require planning, more work than you think, and coordination. Still living with an ideology rather than reality [and I was impressed by how much ideology permeates practice in general].
• And speaking about living with an ideology, the woman who got up at the end and stated that she was from one of the NGO partners who had been 'intimately involved' in two of the projects that had just been described. This was the first time she had seen the data. You should know (or can at least imagine) the rest of that 'question.' Now that's a nightmare!
• At the end I had to ask where, after two hours of presentation and discussion of policy, funding, political, economic, logistical, management, ideological and common-sense reasons for integrating, was the discussion of the audience's POV? Two of the four panelists blew off the question (we already know who the audience is, women I talked to in a clinic told me that's what they wanted) while only one spoke about any attempt to do systematic research with service users/clients. Interesting...somehow that voice isn't important in these meetings?

Nice to feel needed.