Digital entanglements: Medical drones in African healthcare systems.

IF 2.3 3区 医学 Q2 PUBLIC, ENVIRONMENTAL & OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH
Global Public Health Pub Date : 2024-01-01 Epub Date: 2024-10-02 DOI:10.1080/17441692.2024.2405987
Edwin Ambani Ameso
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

The intensified scramble for the digitalisation of healthcare across Africa, coupled with the general drive for digital economies, has ushered in digital health innovations that are reconfiguring national discourses on humanitarian and development contexts. Through these innovations, imaginaries of health have become entangled with aspirations for universal health coverage (UHC) and the actualisation of the health-related sustainable development goals (SDGs). Among these innovations, drones promise to leapfrog and transform conventional African healthcare systems, which have suffered from structural bottlenecks for years, offering citizens on the margins of care critical biomedical gazes. By using drones, African states hope to improve revenue collection, curb corruption, redress health insecurities and deliver life-saving medicines, vaccines and laboratory diagnostics through a last-mile distribution schedule. Ethnographic fieldwork from 2022 to 2023 in Ghana and Malawi on the use of drones found distortions to the health workforce, disruptions to health work, and a pervasive internal brain drain, all exacerbating health-worker shortages. This paper explores how drones are reconfiguring health work and its available labour force in practice amid persistent shortages of health-workers.

数字纠葛:非洲医疗系统中的医疗无人机。
非洲各地对医疗保健数字化的争夺愈演愈烈,加上对数字经济的普遍推动,数字医疗创新正在重构关于人道主义和发展背景的国家论述。通过这些创新,对健康的想象与对全民健康覆盖(UHC)和实现与健康相关的可持续发展目标(SDGs)的渴望纠缠在一起。在这些创新中,无人机有望跨越和改变传统的非洲医疗保健系统,多年来,这些系统一直受到结构性瓶颈的困扰,为处于医疗保健边缘的公民提供关键的生物医学凝视。通过使用无人机,非洲国家希望改善税收、遏制腐败、解决医疗不安全问题,并通过最后一英里配送计划运送救命药品、疫苗和实验室诊断试剂。2022 年至 2023 年在加纳和马拉维进行的关于无人机使用情况的人种学实地调查发现,卫生工作者队伍受到扭曲,卫生工作受到干扰,内部人才流失现象普遍存在,所有这些都加剧了卫生工作者的短缺。本文探讨了在卫生工作者持续短缺的情况下,无人机如何在实践中重新配置卫生工作及其可用劳动力。
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来源期刊
Global Public Health
Global Public Health PUBLIC, ENVIRONMENTAL & OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH-
CiteScore
6.50
自引率
3.00%
发文量
120
期刊介绍: Global Public Health is an essential peer-reviewed journal that energetically engages with key public health issues that have come to the fore in the global environment — mounting inequalities between rich and poor; the globalization of trade; new patterns of travel and migration; epidemics of newly-emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases; the HIV/AIDS pandemic; the increase in chronic illnesses; escalating pressure on public health infrastructures around the world; and the growing range and scale of conflict situations, terrorist threats, environmental pressures, natural and human-made disasters.
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