Let Derek Yach describe a scenario for you: In a mountain village, vaccinations are expensive and difficult to obtain. Doctors only come every so often to deliver vaccines to children, so when the doctors make their visits, the families will travel many days through the mountains to meet the doctors. On one such trip, as the doctors are approaching the village, a car rolls off of the road in front of them, and the driver has fractured her femur and is bleeding heavily.
The doctors face a decision: They could treat the driver immediately and save her life but not reach the children waiting for vaccinations, or they could continue their trip up the mountain to deliver their vaccinations while letting the driver suffer her injuries alone.
In his TEDx talk, Derek Yach asks, “What would you do?”
He explains that physicians are trained to treat those who are in front of us, even though this means potentially ignoring the long term needs of those who will become sick in the future.
This ethical dilemma, Yach explains, is currently at the forefront of our health system. He explains that the manifestation of this decision is that governments and private sector health industries across the world spend nearly 95 percent of their budgets on treatments and care. Preventive care is less than 5 percent of most budgets.
The overall impact of this spending decision hurts societies and families in the long term.
What can we do? Yach proposes three starting places to enact change:
- Take ownership to place health promotion at the core of our lives.
- Place health at the center of business goals to prevent disease within the workplace, marketplace, and community.
- Make corporate reporting on health more transparent so that we can decide whether a company is truly committed to making society healthier.
Yach is the chief health office of Vitality and leads the Vitality Institute. He and Penn Memory Center Co-Director Dr. Jason Karlawish jointly hosted a symposium titled “Aging and Cognition: Maintaining Economic Security in Later Life” at the University of Pennsylvania in May 2016.