CWAS Lecture Series Review (19): On Public Health Emergency given the context of Covid-19

Over the past few years, with the Covid-19 pandemic, we have heightened awareness concerning health and healthcare. Although the pandemic has increased public awareness of health, we have been witnessing an increase in demand for healthcare services that have strained our healthcare systems even before the pandemic.

On the afternoon of November 11, 2021, Professor Nora Colton, the Director of the UCL Global Business School of Health gave a lecture named “On Public Health Emergency given the context of Covid-19 and Ebola virus”, exploring some of the emerging themes in terms of healthcare management, such as systems thinking for population health management and more preventive healthcare rather than healthcare systems mainly focused on treatment.the lecture was held online through Feishu Meeting.

In Prof. Nora Colton’s speech, there are three major challenges to health care systems in the context of the pandemic: Structural inequalities in social determinants, global ageing problem as well as chronic diseases and unhealthy lifestyles, and she listed five social factors which could make a real difference to social health: economic stability, social background, living environment, medical level and education. She believed that instead of just increasing health workers, we should rely on technology to balance the increased demand with the lack of health workers, and that’s how we can build a better and more effective health care system and literally address the problem.

Collateral Damage has been caused to health care system by Covid-19 pandemic. The health care system cannot return to normal while there are still large amount of surgery and other health services need to be carried out during the pandemic time, which caused in increase in global morbidity and mortality. Prof. Nora Colton put forward with new approaches to improve health care, including attaching greater emphasis on prevention, making much use of technology, telemedicine, and making analysis of health care data for better prevention and care outcomes, etc.

In the end, Prof. Nora Colton gave an introduction to UCL Global Business School of Health, the first business school aimed to educate the next generation of health and health care management leaders, and answered some questions of audiences.

Prof. Nora Colton finished her lecture with the conclusion: the only way we can respond to COVID-19 is to ensure that people have equal access to healthy lives through effective health care systems. We must act as an international community, and we must confront these problems, not individually, but in a common way. It’s not just about health care, it’s about everyone in our world being able to have a good quality of life and be able to deal with the ongoing pandemic.

About the lecurer

Professor Nora Colton is the Director of the UCL Global Business School of Health. She is a health and development economist with extensive experience in change management and strategy.  Previous to this role, she was the UCL Pro-Vice-Provost (Postgraduate Education) and Joint Director of Education at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and Moorfields Eye Hospital.  She has been a Professor of International Economics at Drew University, USA; Dean of Business and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at University of East London (UEL), UK; and a visiting professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Electronic Science and Technology (UESTC), Chengdu, China as well as the American University in Beirut (AUB), Lebanon.