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‘Update study on health of Pacific islanders’
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Posted on May 11 2008
Micronesian leaders have asked a U.S. senator to push for an updated study on the health of Pacific islanders.
The chief executives of the Northern Marianas, Guam, Palau, the Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia have written Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye to lobby for another Institute of Medicine report on the health status of the U.S.-associated islands in the Pacific.
The leaders said the last IOM report was “a sentinel document which has stimulated much positive change and improvement in the health status in our region.” But the progress, they said, had been uneven and the challenges to improve the islands’ collective health status were daunting.
The report, titled “Pacific Partnerships for Health—Charting a New Course,” was published in 1998.
“We ask that, as with the previous IOM report in 1998, your office champion a new IOM report for the region, which can inventory our successes and shortfalls in the health sector and redevelop a new set of recommendations that are consistent with the first decade of the new millennium and beyond,” the leaders said in a letter written in the recently ended Micronesian Chief Executives Summit in Palau.
In 1998, the federal medical institute found health care problems in the Pacific: deteriorating health facilities, high health care costs, high rates of substance abuse and infant death, and lack of trained medical personnel.
