Exploring London: My Journey Abroad

Presenter: Saili Khorjekar, Public Health Sciences, Global Public Health Scholars

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For my practicum project, I took a Public Health class through CIEE at the University of College London during my winter semester this year. We learned about Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), a free healthcare system, and focused on the benefits and costs of having free healthcare. Not only that, we learned about the challenges the government has faced and is still facing, especially during COVID. The biggest issue that the NHS currently faces. Additionally, they have an ongoing issue of a lack of funding and resource allocation throughout Britain. Some other topics that we focused on were politics, technology, public health, medical ethics, and culture and migration, all in relation to the NHS. Furthermore, we took various co-curricular that related to showing us the healthcare system, and our final projects were a group debate on whether or not the NHS should remain a free healthcare system and a group project focusing on a specific issue. My topic was based on pharmaceutical industries and their relationships with the NHS and government as a whole. These final projects helped us tie together the various costs to free healthcare and discussed how it impacted an individual’s access to healthcare. I learned that even though they have free healthcare, they still face numerous challenges such as equitable access to quality healthcare and resource allocation. This is important to understand because we can compare other global healthcare systems and potentially address the challenges that the US healthcare system faces, such as the lack of universal coverage.