Innovation is key to prevent future disease/pandemics
Paulo Gadelha 8-23-21 As coordinator of the FIOCRUZ Strategy for the 2030 Agenda, Dr. Paulo Gadelha is in charge of promoting FIOCRUZ’s strategic engagement with the Agenda’s aspirational principles and goals. His background in technology includes studies of the application of technology in public health, healthcare models, and the history of STI. He is also a former member of the 10-Member Group appointed by the UN Secretary-General to support the Technology Facilitation Mechanism with the Inter-agency Task Team on STI for the SDGs. Dr. Gadelha served as president of Fiocruz from 2009 to 2016, leading scientific achievements in biomedical sciences, the generation of scientific and technological knowledge, and health and social development promotion. Previously, he founded and directed “Casa de Oswaldo Cruz”, a Fiocruz Institute dedicated to the sociology and history of science and health. Dr. Gadelha served as a member of the National Health Council’s Science and Technology Intersectoral Commission. As President of the Brazilian Association of Collective Health, he chaired the 11th World Congress on Public Health. In 2017, with UN/DESA, he chaired FIOCRUZ’s efforts in organizing the 1st Consultation on Health and STI in the 2030 Agenda’s implementation. [HEALTH TECHNOLOGIES ARE CRUCIAL FOR FUTURE PANDEMICS, https://www.gstic.org/expert-story/health-technologies-are-crucial-for-future-pandemics/] //WAgustin
Health is the best indicator for the advancements on the intertwined 2030 Agenda’s Sustainable Development Goals. The agenda’s principles of equity, sustainability, peace and human rights cannot be fulfilled without equitable health systems based on primary care and fit-for-purpose Science, Technology and Innovation.
Health technologies play a central role in sustainable development
COVID-19 has revealed in a dramatic way how health plays a central role in sustainable development. The pandemic disrupted with unseen speed and on a big scale peoples’ well-being, the economy and society. This reflects social, economic and environmental determinants deeply rooted in the unsustainable prevailing model of global development.
The role of Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) is undisputable. COVID-19 highlighted different challenges: strengthening evidence-based policies, fostering citizen science, sharing knowledge and R&D platforms and speeding up system analysis to face global challenges.
Health Economic-Industrial Complex (HEIC) to serve the Sustainable Development Goals
The Health Economic-Industrial Complex concept was developed in Brazil in the early 2000s, integrating a structuralist view of the political economy with a public health vision. This perspective advances, in relation to sectoral approaches in health industries and services, towards a systemic approach to the productive environment, focusing on the dimensions of innovation and universal access to health.
Health production is seen in an interdependent way, recognizing that the different industrial and service sectors have strong articulations that need to be integrated. The shift towards a universal care model that focuses on human and social needs requires innovation and a productive knowledge base. This favours promotion, prevention, and economic sustainability of health systems, which requires innovation and new productive patterns of goods and services.
The Brazilian experience is an exemplary case of association between the development of theoretical conception and its implementation in the national health policy. This led to the link between economic development policies and social policies supported by a new regulatory, legal and normative framework, among which Partnership for Product Development (PDP) involving global leaders of strategic products, national labs and private national enterprises.
It was possible to advance both conceptually in terms of a vision of health and social well-being and contribute to a new public policy paradigm. This perspective guided innovation, industrial development, and services towards the human needs and universal health systems at a much lower cost and also considering the challenges brought by the context of an ongoing fourth technological revolution.