My name is Gillian Lê.
I work in health financing for low resourced Asia Pacific, particularly Southeast Asia. My background is Anthropology.
In 2023, I read a report about climate finance for global health. And I couldn’t pin down what it meant for health systems at the grassroots, in the places that I worked in.
Financing is consistently identified by governments as the No.1 need for health systems.
But the discussion on climate finance for health seemed defined by the culture and norms of international organizations and academic circles.
I struggled to find a point of real entry into those discussions. They seemed utterly irrelevant to the day-to-day work of doctors at health centres in northern Phongsaly (Lao PDR); or nurses doing community outreach in An Giang delta (Southern Vietnam); or women trying to get quality attendance at birth in remote Ratanakiri (Cambodia).
This blog is my attempt to understand climate finance that increasingly includes biodiversity. What is it? How does it work? How can low resource health systems get it? How should and will healthcare change because of it?
The Anthropology bit is important because I don’t believe in ‘copy+paste’ health development: copying projects or concepts that worked in one country or context and then pasting into a different setting.
I believe that every country can get to zero pollution, awe inspiring biodiversity, and climate resilient health systems in their own particular way. A way that works locally, building on all the “assets” that exist there.
Assets is an inclusive word – it can include physical assets like a network of functioning health centres, and it can include team spirit, working trust-full relations between primary care and hospital-based doctors; forest parks for nature-based-prescriptions, local electrical-mechanical knowledge to fix broken equipment. And so much more.
I like to take a strengths-based approach, together with commitment to low-cost solutions with inbuilt maintenance that can speed health system transformation towards living health systems in low resourced Asia-Pacific and beyond.
‘Living Health Systems’ is an inspired by a green building approach – the Living Buildings Challenge at the International Living Futures Institute. The Living Building Challenges mandates beauty and biophilia by design, building without toxic materials, independence in water and energy, circular economy for materials, and embedding buildings within local cultural histories and ecologies for awe inspiring places to live and work in.
If our systems worked like that, what could healthcare look like?
Previously I was based in Ho Chi Minh city, but these days in UK.
