Healthcare motivated

Part I offers a wider perspective on the pharmaceutical industry. Joel Lexchin s chapter introduces many of the criticisms the industry faces. He discusses how pharmaceutical companies are motivated to increase their profits rather than focus on the healthcare needs of populations. He identifies a number of strategies firms use to increase profits... 

Despite the high risk and escalating costs to develop new medicines, the benefits of pharmaceuticals to human healthcare provide both financial as well as humanitarian motivation to pharmaceutical companies and to the individual drug discovery scientists. 

For industrial-scale natural product chemistry there is a host of motives control of population growth, securing nutrition, improving healthcare, supply with luxury items. 

Aviation, nuclear power, chemical and petroleum industries are, like healthcare, hazardous activities carried out in large, complex organizations by, for the most part, dedicated and highly trained people. Commercial, political, social and humanitarian pressures have compelled these industries to raise their game and make sustained efforts to improve and maintain safety. Healthcare, in contrast, has relied on the intrinsic motivation and professionalism of clinical and managerial staff which, while vital, is not sufficient to ensure... 

When patients and families are included in gatherings of patient safety stakeholders, their primary contributions have been to share stories of preventable injury in healthcare and their impact on patients lives. We are gratified to have made this contribution. The voice of patients and families who have suffered preventable medical injury is a powerful motivational force for healthcare providers across the globe who wish, first, to do no harm. 

Extreme poverty is the daily reality of very many of the world s people Even without the effects of hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and landslides, the immediate prospects for both the urban and rural poor in many parts of the world are bleak, with little or no access to even the most basic of infrastructure, education and healthcare, and with little, or at best tenuous, legal tenure to land or property [10]. That this is a situation of major injustice, that engineers have the skills to ameliorate this injustice, and that this gives rise to at the very least an oppoitunity of professional capabilities, provide the basic motivations for taking an active role in such poverty reduction. 

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