The government, business and academic world are coming together to
thrash out the crisis management issues posed by the SARS epidemic.
They say that even though the disease's impact is temporary, it
does offer long－term operational lessons. The assessment
emerged during a Beijing workshop, jointly sponsored by the Boao
Forum for Asia and the Asian Development Bank.
Criticism outweighs compliments at the forum. Economists,
entrepreneurs and foreign diplomats are using the event to do a
postmortem on the SARS epidemic so far. Alistair Nicholas is from
the leading US－based PR company Edelman. He says speed
is key in a crisis.
"Two ingredients of crisis management, speed and open
communication. In a time of high technology, if you don't
communicate openly, someone else will communicate for you," said
Alistair J. Nicholas, general manager of Edelman
（China） Beijing Office.
The crisis has also brought into question the monitoring systems
and overall health care network on the Chinese mainland, as well as
other Asian countries. Some say traditional ideas need to
change.
"One of the major concerns is that generally in Chinese society,
the link between economic development and health is not established
in a sense that investment in health can help maintain healthy
economic growth. They are only regarded as costs," said Kerstin
Leitner of UN Development Program.
This means the health sector has been neglected. And in China, the
situation is compounded by the challenge to manage the transition
from a centrally planned to a market economy. It's led to a
dangerous imbalance.
"In China, over the last 20 years, public spending has gone down
from 25 percent to 16 percent of the overall health system. Private
spending rise to 61 percent. Only people that can afford could get
good medical service. That's very dangerous," said Kerstin
Leitner.
As
a result, Leitner believes poor people in rural areas have
increasingly less access to quality health care and the gap between
the city and the country is widening. Forum participants agree that
the likelihood of future epidemics will be greatly reduced if
fiscal and administrative changes are applied to the public health
system.
SARS is not the first, nor will be the last medical crisis to cast
a shadow over the planet. But it does offer lessons on how we can
cope with similar situations in the future. If we take those
lessons on board, SARS may finally have something to contribute to
the health of the nation.
(CCTV.com May 16, 2003)