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Health Check: 04/10/2010

04/10/2010

BBC World Service - Health Check, 04/10/2010

Maternal health or vaccinating children? Another debate on how to improve global health

What has more impact – better maternal health or more vaccinations for children? Inflatable portable operating theatre to train doctors. Updated version of Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs

The third of four debates on improving global health in which Claudia Hammond asks experts to put their cause on the line – to fight for the one thing that would make the most difference to the health of the world’s poorest people. This week, Julian Lob-Levyt from the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation and Professor Oona Campbell from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine argue for vaccinating more children against improving the health of mothers. 

Simulation centres to train doctors how to deal with difficult operations are now very realistic, but also very expensive. Roger Kneebone, Reader in Surgical Education at Imperial College in London, is the man behind a low cost portable operating theatre which looks like an igloo and inflates in just 3 minutes.  Claudia discovers from trainee surgeon Alex Cope that although the patients are just lifelike mannequins things can still get pretty hectic. Roger Kneebone tells her that the igloo is being used to train doctors all over the world. 

Back in the 1940s the psychologist Abraham Maslow studied successful individuals like Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt to work out what motivated them, and consequentially all of us. The result was a hierarchy of human needs usually laid out like a pyramid. He said our primary motivation in life is to satisfy our physiological needs like food, water and shelter. Once we’ve got those we strive for security. Next up the pyramid is love, then esteem and at the top is the big one – self-actualisation - fulfilling our creative potential.  But now it’s had a revamp. Claudia Hammond talks to Doug Kenrick, Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University in the United States about how he has redrawn the pyramid.

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