Salud everywhere is a personal initiative designed to provide current and future health professionals in international cooperation and humanitarian aid with access to essential information on these topics, all from a critical perspective.
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Who writes Salud everywhere?
My name is Bruno Abarca Tomás. I am a medical doctor, of Spanish origin, and I work professionally in public health in humanitarian action and development cooperation (see Linkedin profile).
I studied medicine because I wanted to work in what was then known as international health. While balancing my studies with various volunteer activities and associations, I was fortunate to spend a year studying global health toward the end of my degree. I left my specialization in public health and preventive medicine halfway through to jump into international cooperation. Since then, I’ve worked in this field in over fifteen countries. Currently, I work at Action Against Hunger, focusing on health system strengthening, sexual and reproductive health, and advocating for access to health. I also teach online as a professorial lecturer in public health in complex humanitarian emergencies at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University in Washington, DC.
I have been a blogger (and even a photoblogger) for twenty years with more or less intensity. However, today I write Salud everywhere with a lot of humility and respect, because I am far from being the person who knows the most about this. There are lots of people who know much more, who have much more and more diverse experience, and who communicate better. I simply decided to launch this site because when I started I would have loved to find something like this.
My name is Bruno Abarca Tomás. I am a medical doctor, of Spanish origin, and I work professionally in public health, humanitarian action and development cooperation (see Linkedin profile).
I studied medicine because I wanted to work in what was then known as international health. While balancing my studies with various volunteer activities and associations, I was fortunate to spend a year studying global health toward the end of my degree. I left my specialization in public health and preventive medicine halfway through to jump into international cooperation. Since then, I’ve worked in this field in over fifteen countries. Currently, I work at Action Against Hunger, focusing on health system strengthening, sexual and reproductive health, and advocating for access to health. I also teach online as a professorial lecturer in public health in complex humanitarian emergencies at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University in Washington, DC.
I have been a blogger (and even a photoblogger) for twenty years with more or less intensity. However, today I write Salud everywhere with a lot of humility and respect, because I am far from being the person who knows the most about this. There are lots of people who know much more, who have much more and more diverse experience, and who communicate better. I simply decided to launch this site because when I started I would have loved to find something like this.
Salud everywhere is NOT written by an artificial intelligence
Who in their right mind decides to write long pages of text on different topics in the era of generative artificial intelligence? Me. It’s probably not the way to make content creation profitable, but that’s not what I’m aiming for. By writing Salud Everywhere, I’m looking to create something that can be useful for colleagues in the field of international health cooperation and humanitarian action, while also giving myself the chance to learn and stay up-to-date on all these topics.
In any case, although I personally write the content of all the pages of Salud everywhere, I do rely on many computer tools (including generative artificial intelligence) throughout the process. It would be best if I detail it, for the sake of transparency, and in case someone else might find it useful for their work:
I use many tools for research
In order to write most of the pages of Salud everywhere I have done extensive research beforehand, as in a typical bibiographic review. Although I do not use detailed references inserted in the text as I would do in a scientific journal article, I do detail in the "external links" column all the sources I have consulted and on which I have relied.
I usually search for these sources through Google Scholar and the references listed in the most relevant materials. I also supplement my search with humanitarian web platforms and general Google searches. Occasionally, I use ChatGPT or Perplexity (in their limited free versions) to ask for basic general information on a topic, suggestions for subtopics I should explore to better understand the main subject of the article I’m preparing, or to directly request a selection of relevant references. However, in my experience, the references they suggest rarely match the relevance of those I can find directly through other methods.
I make occasional use of tools to identify areas of interest in long reports
Although I usually read scientific journal articles and short reports directly, I also use tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity or NotebookLM to upload long reports and ask questions about their content, which help me find the relevant information more easily. I find that this usually gives me much better results than searching for specific terms in the PDF or the table of contents.
Once I have identified how the document addresses the topic I am asking about, and in which sections, I go directly to the document in question to consult in detail the specific section of interest. I hope that one day tools like NotebookLM will show the origin of their references directly on the PDF format and not on the text, which makes reviewing very cumbersome.
I occasionally use tools to organize my scattered ideas
I find it very practical to write "messy" or unstructured content to a tool like ChatGPT, and ask it to help me rewrite it in a more coherent and logical way, without deleting or adding anything. This can be very handy for dealing with specific paragraphs, which sometimes contain too much information, as a list of examples. I also find it useful to have a first draft of the introductory paragraph, which I develop only once I have already written the whole page. In any case, I never copy the proposed draft directly, but use it (if I like it) as a basis for rewriting my final version of the text.
I don’t use these tools to summarize texts. I aim to ensure adequate readability for long texts on computer screens and mobile devices by keeping sections or subsections under 300 words, paragraphs generally under 150 words, and most sentences under 15 words. However, I carry out this style review myself, striving for a certain level of consistency (which is challenging) in the style of my different pages.
I do make extensive use of tools to translate what I write
I write my page originally in Spanish and use the TranslatePress plugin to translate it into English as well. This plugin uses its own AI tools for automatic translations, although I sometimes replace them with translations made using other tools like ChatGPT, which (in my opinion) provide more accurate translations for complex terminology.
Although I work in English on a daily basis, it’s not my native language, and I may make mistakes (more than in Spanish) that I prefer to avoid. However, knowing that automatic translations don’t always sound organic or natural, I also review and edit them manually to the best of my ability.
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