Mozambique : towards a people's health service / edited by Gillian Walt and Angela Melamed.

"Mozambique: Towards A People's Health Service is an account of the new socialist health service in Mozambique, and the problems entailed in setting it up. In this book a group of doctors, nurses, health planners and social scientists, each of whom has spent some two to four years working as cooperantes at district, provincial or national levels, set out their experiences of the day-to-day struggles encountered in Mozambique's attempt to transform the colonial health service into one meeting the needs of ordinary people. A recurring theme is that the development of health care in a revolutionary society is in part a political process, and one that can only benefit from people's involvement in the decisions that shape it. Introducing democratic participation throughout the health service has, therefore, been one of the most basic changes made. This book also confronts the difficulties inherent in extending health care to scattered rural populations, overcoming the lack of skilled personnel and adequate resources of every kind, deciding how to handle the giant pharmaceutical multinationals, and so on. The problems are legion; the goal, a people's health service that avoids the pitfalls that have beset so many less progressive African countries."--Provided by publisher.