Global Help (Health Education Using Low-Cost Publications)

The Global HELP Organization, commonly referred to as HELP (Health Education using Low-cost Publications), provides free health-care information to developing countries and is committed to making medical knowledge accessible worldwide.

What is the story of Global HELP?
After experiencing the tragedy of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Drs. Lynn & Lana Staheli came to the conclusion that the best way to deal with conflict in the world was to address the underlying causes. While recognizing that the causes of terrorism are complex and multiple, the Stahelis believed the fundamental causes included poverty, despair, and poor health-care. Improving health would lead to a more peaceful world, they concluded, and improving health requires access to health-care information.

Given their backgrounds in medicine, academia, and publishing, providing access to health-education resources seemed a logical and powerful way to give something back. This spawned the idea for Global HELP (Health Education using Low-cost Publications): the creation, distribution, and broad access to affordable health-education materials.

While teaching in numerous countries, the Stahelis witnessed first-hand the need for information sharing in the medical world. Traditional sources of health-care information in journals and medical books that are traditionally produced in the United States and Europe were unaffordable and sometimes unsuitable in other areas of the world. They saw whole hospitals whose entire medical libraries did not fill a single bookshelf.

How could this health-care information gap be closed in other countries at an affordable cost or for free? Based on the Stahelis' personal experience in creating computer-generated textbooks, digital publications looked like an excellent solution. Digital publications are generally created at low-cost and can be distributed without charge on the web or at a nominal cost in print or on compact discs.

In 2002, the Stahelis put the vision into action and created Global HELP, a not-for-profit organization.

Just six years later, Global HELP continues to expand its selection of free and low-cost publications -- focused primarily as web-site PDF downloads -- finding different ways to distribute medical information to new countries and new people every day.
Browse this wonderful website:
http://www.global-help.org/