Health is something that challenges everyone during more difficult parts of life. We are, as humans, united by our vulnerability represented in our bodies frailty--and it thus becomes a quest to collaboratively build better systems of care, based on the information we can gather from those suffering and falling through the cracks of our current practices.
The Health Challenges Project is an outreach to connect community members with shared health issues together, with an additional goal being to explore how health impacts life, work, and fulfillment--as well as what the struggles to develop quality health care that reaches all those who are suffering looks like. What issues do patients face in trying to get proper diagnosis, care, and successful treatment? How does this affect those who are uninsured, or who cannot afford treatment even when insured?
The term 'health challenges' is used over the term 'disabilities' for the forum title to be more inclusive of the fact that everyone has health challenges at one point or another interrupt their lives, although the sliding scale of how much interruption occurs varies from person to person. We are all united with our capacity and inevitability of some kind of suffering of body or mind or soul, and it is at this point we can reshape our societies in more empathetic ways, to offer care and dignity for those suffering.
The Health Challenges Project calls out for submissions that contextualize individual struggle within the systems that make things more difficult for patients seeking help in the form of accurate diagnosis, affordable care, and healing treatment. These stories are somewhat less formal and more personal than our magazine features, reflecting the ideology that the personal is political is personal, but are still based in informed advocacy about the conditions our contributors live with, and their journeys in attempts to find relief. The goal here is to discover what these stories have in common, and to connect with others across bridges with others facing similar paths.
Forum leaders are sought to expand this project.