Background: The Lancet Planetary Health Commission and Rockefeller Foundation report highlights threeglobal challenges to the future health of our planet and the living things that inhabit it. TheSTEMA resourcefulness approach aims to address some of the imaginationchallenges andknowledge failures by proposing a framework that takes an ecosystem approach to healthburdens in low-resource settings, looking at how innovations can address gaps betweenformal and informal health systems through a series of case studiesin order to create adecision-making framework.
Methods: A case study synthesis of innovative, community led health interventions in low-resourcesettings was conducted to understand what are the components and processes that lead tointerventions being most resourceful. 15 projects were studied remotely, and 2 case studieswere studied first hand through involvement in the interventions themselves, these tookplace in the Peruvian Amazon and rural Sierra Leone.A mixed methods approach of analysis was taken to draw out direct and indirect healthoutcomes of interventions, combining the expertise of global health, health science,architecture and inclusive design researchers.
Findings: Health burdens in low-resource setting have complex, interrelated, social, environmentaland cultural causes and barriers. The most successful interventions involve a deepunderstanding of the ‘socio-ecological’ health system that operates in that intervention’sspecific context, often incorporating inclusive design approaches. In order to understandthis context, we have developed a resourcefulness framework that determines the pre-conditions or barriers to health in a local context, and then the resources that could bemobilised to overcome those gaps.
Interpretation: The framework usually addresses a specific health concern, but the ecosystem approachoften generates secondary or even unexpected health outcomes of the given intervention,contributing to long term resilience and resourcefulness of a community’s healthecosystem.
