Dr. Zahirul Islam, Program Officer, Health, SIDA attended our 9th Policy Breakfast on Urban Primary Health Care held on July 28, 2016. He pointed out a different dimension of urban health care, which is migration and how it is impacting our health system. He said, if we want to address the problem of urban health needs, it’s should be the poor because cheap labor or accumulation of capital, all these are taking place in cities and these are contributed by poor people. Since body is their permanent and only asset, urban health should be priority.
We need to re-organize and re-orient our urban health system including all the actors and institutions, especially the local government institutions, who have big role to play. He concluded his speech by making a crucial note on urbanization. He thinks, urbanization should be more planned, organized, pro-poor, more inclusive.