Primary Healthcare In Costa Rica
Last month I had the honor of traveling with Ariadne Labs to Costa Rica to document the country’s Primary Healthcare system, which has become a model for the world. We traveled all over the country photographing doctors, nurses, administrators and patients from the Nicaraguan border to the North to the Panamanian border to the South and from coast to coast.
A collaboration between the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Ariadne Labs is a Boston based healthcare innovation center that is focused on using real world data, a rigorous scientific approach and best practices to uncover and share programs that improve patient care around the world. You can read about their mission here. I was first introduced to Ariadne labs when I photographed their founder, Atul Gawande, for his book Being Mortal. Dr. Gawande is practicing surgeon at the Brigham, the author of several best selling books, a writer for the New Yorker, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and at Harvard Medical school, among many, many other things.
I traveled with a team from Ariadne Labs that included Madeline Pesec, a Brown University medical school student and Ariadne Labs primary care researcher who has spent considerable time in Costa Rica and Deborah O'Neil, Ariadne's director of communications. After the trip, Deborah shared this with me:
"Two years ago, we produced a comprehensive report about Costa Rica's impressive primary health care system and we realized we had no photos of what it looked like. I've been wanting to visually document what the delivery high-quality care looks like ever since so we can make it real for the rest of the world. I had never done such a project at Ariadne Labs, but I knew there would be a powerful visual story in such an effort. Finding the right photographer was essential.
From the start, Tim brought curiosity, openness and a collaborative spirit to the project. It was clear to me he was as interested in documenting and capturing Costa Rica's story as we were. On the ground, Tim was a joy to work with, flexible, easy going and endlessly creative about how to make better photos of the ideas we wanted to capture. His images are a testament to his considerable talent at putting people at ease and making beautiful pictures. One of the best representations of his talent to me is the photo he took of the EDUS mobile app that is used by patients and clinicians. This is not a photo of a smiling child or an emotional moment; it's a gadget. Yet Tim found a way to make even that photo spectacular.
All of Tim's photos are going to help us better communicate to the world that it is possible to improve health care for all at a national level. Costa Rica provides the world with a model and an inspiration. "
In the 1990s the Costa Rican government reformed the country’s healthcare system with a emphasis on the importance of quality primary care. The Ministry of Health and the Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social committed to making team based, data driven and life long primary care accessible equitably to the whole population.
The goal of our project was to photograph as wide an array of scenarios as possible in the week that we were there. That often meant 4AM wake up calls and long hours of driving, but the exposure that we had to even the most remote healthcare facilities was incredible.
It was interesting for me to see how much the people of Costa Rica appreciated and respected their healthcare system. Everywhere we went we were welcomed, into hospitals, into clinics, into homes. As soon as people heard we were with the Caja they were happy to help.
I’m extremely proud of this series of photographs, and I’m equally proud to play even a small part in the story that Ariadne Labs is telling about the Costa Rican healthcare system and how other countries can learn from it’s success. If you want to read the current report and learn much more about the system, you can find it here.
