• Grassroots women’s groups could halve maternal death rate
• Analysis of official development assistance for reproductive health finds that less than a tenth of funding is directed towards family planning
• Death rate in HIV infected pregnant women eight times higher than for non-HIV infected
• Need to go beyond “essential interventions” for reducing maternal deaths highlighted in study of 29 countries
• 1 in 4 women in developing countries who wish to avoid pregnancy have unmet need for modern contraception
• Gender ‘missing and misunderstood’ in global health

Find the special issue here.

José translates instructions about how to take anti-nausea medications after chemotherapy into Dominga’s native language, Kaqchikel.

Cancer rates are rapidly rising in Latin American countries, according to a recent report published in the Lancet [1]. Low- and middle-income countries of Latin America have a lower overall prevalence of cancer, but higher cancer death rates, than developed nations. This disparity can be largely explained by several common themes in cancer care provision throughout Latin America: late diagnoses, poor access to treatment, and limited availability of efficacious therapies.

Guatemala faces many of the challenges that beset Latin American countries in cancer care. Geographic, economic, and linguistic barriers conspire to restrict access to cancer therapy for a large portion of the population. Guatemala’s National Cancer Hospital [Instituto de Cancerología, INCAN], the nation’s only institution that provides cancer care to the public sector, is located in the capital, Guatemala City. Patients living in other areas of the country—particularly rural areas—must travel anywhere from several hours to several days to reach the hospital. Although INCAN receives some funding from the Guatemalan Ministry of Health to offset the costs of patients’ initial laboratory exams and diagnostic procedures, patients must pay for the majority of their treatment costs, which are all too often prohibitively expense. While the majority of Guatemala’s population is indigenous and 23 indigenous languages are spoken in the country [2], all services at INCAN are delivered in Spanish. On top of these issues, the hospital itself suffers from an enormous backlog of 1200+ patients on the waiting list for radiotherapy services. These problems are intimately linked to poor follow-up care and patient retention rates. According to the director of the hospital, Dr. Walter Guerra, 33% of patients who receive a cancer diagnosis at INCAN never begin treatment; 33% of patients start, but do not finish, therapy; and only 33% of patients complete the recommended course of therapy. These statistics are worse for indigenous patients with cancer, 50% of whom never begin treatment after initial diagnosis.

In the midst of these challenges, the non-governmental sector has come to represent an important source of health care for many Guatemalans [2-4]. In Guatemala alone, there are an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 non-governmental organizations [NGOs], many of which are involved in health care provision to varying degrees [2]. Other Latin American countries, such as Bolivia, El Salvador, and Mexico, have experienced similar explosions in the NGO sector in recent years, in light of global economic policies encouraging the privatization of social services [5-7].

Private sector health organizations could play a crucial role in increasing the number of patients who make it all the way through treatment. Take the case of Dominga Puac*, a 60-year-old woman who was diagnosed with cervical cancer three years ago. Dominga is a monolingual speaker of the Mayan language Kaqchikel. She lives in a small adobe house in a rural hamlet of the highland town of San Juan Comalapa, and supports herself through subsistence agriculture, farming a small plot of land adjacent to her home. In 2010, Dominga began to experience vaginal hemorrhage. After seeking care at the local government health center in San Juan Comalapa, Dominga was referred to INCAN.

Public transportation from Dominga’s village to San Juan Comalapa is only available once a week, and as such, Dominga planned well in advance the four-hour journey to the capital. When she arrived at INCAN for an initial consultation, she barely understood what the Spanish-speaking doctors there told her. She completed required initial laboratory exams, whose costs were already beyond her means, only to receive a staggering estimate of treatment costs for several thousand quetzales—more money than she sees in one year. Lacking the ability to pay for the services, she did not return to INCAN for her first chemotherapy appointment.

Over the next year, the hemorrhage worsened. Dominga grew increasingly concerned and desperate. With the help of relatives and village officials, Dominga reached out to Maya Health Alliance, a non-governmental organization (NGO) that sponsors a nutrition and primary health care program in a nearby village. After initial evaluation by a physician, Dominga was enrolled in the NGO’s Complex Care Program, which attends to rural patients with specialized health care needs ranging from pediatric heart surgeries to dialysis to cancer care. Through this program, Maya Health Alliance currently funds treatment for about 75 patients who require treatments in tertiary care centers in Guatemala City. Sometimes, the costs of treatment are covered in conjunction with other NGOs or charities, and local Guatemalan institutions collaborate with Maya Health Alliance by offering services at- or marginally above-cost.

Addressing economic barriers to care, however, is only one component of Maya Health Alliance’s Complex Care Program. Fulltime staff member José Cali works to address the cultural and logistical barriers to care, which would otherwise represent formidable obstacles for patients from rural and indigenous areas of Guatemala. José, who is bilingual in Kaqchikel and Spanish, takes care of the nitty-gritty details of scheduling consultations, transportation, and language interpretation.

Staff member José Cali begins his day at INCAN by reviewing the cases of the six patients whose care he will be managing for the day.

The philosophy of patient accompaniment has long been recognized by health organizations, such as Partners in Health and the American Cancer Society, as a crucial step towards breaking down barriers to care for impoverished and underserved patients. In the realm of cancer care, a handful of other NGOs in Guatemala with similar programming to that of Maya Health Alliance can attest to this fact. Even when NGOs do not fund patients’ therapy or provide only partial funding, the logistical support in transportation, communication, and follow-up visits that they offer can spell the difference between a patient abandoning and finishing cancer treatment. By accompanying patients through care, non-governmental organizations could play an important role in reducing cancer disparities and deaths in Guatemala and, more broadly, Latin America.

–
References
[1] Lancet Oncology. 2013. Abstract. 14:391-436.
[2] Rohloff, P, Kraemer Díaz, A, and Dasgupta, S. 2011. “Beyond development”: A critical appraisal of the emergence of small health care non governmental organizations in rural Guatemala. Human Organization 70(4):427-437.
[3] Maupin, JN. 2009. “Fruit of the Accords”: Health Care Reform and Civil Participation in Highland Guatemala. Social Science and Medicine 68(8):1456-63.
[4] Cardelle, AJ. 2003. Health Care Reform in Central America: NGO-Government Collaboration in Guatemala and El Salvador. Miami, FL: North-South Center Press.
[5] Gill, L. 2000. Teetering on the Rim: Global Restructuring, Daily Life, and the Armed Retreat of the Bolivian State. New York: Columbia University Press.
[6] Smith-Nonini, S. 2010. Healing the Body Politic: El Salvador’s Popular Struggle for Health Rights from Civil War to Neoliberal Peace. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
[7] Schneider, SD. 2010 Mexican Community Health and the Politics of Health Reform. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.

–

*Pseudonym.
Dominga and José gave permission for their photos to be used in this post.

As an epidemiologist and a physician myself, I see on a daily basis the real and deep morality to statistics and their accurate collection, interpretation, and discussion.  Real people live and die on the basis of how we as citizens, policy makers, and clinical providers process data.   Indeed, all of us, regardless of our professions, are confronted with statistics about life and death on a daily basis.  What we or our policy makers rarely do, however, is analyze deeply these statistics and how they actually impact our lives.  This is the heart of the approach that Drs. Stuckler and Basu take to analyzing economic policies at times of recessions: what do data tell us, beyond rhetoric and intuition and biases, about how governments should respond? Interestingly, the answer to recessions is to focus less on deficits and make key infrastructure, public health, and employment investments.

Drs. Stuckler and Basu take a rigorous, insightful, and approachable look at the mountains of data that have accumulated as a result of the large-scale austerity experiment.  Building off a growing academic literature, they build a strong case for the subtitle of their book: that austerity both suppresses economic growth and decimates population health, that governments’ must maintain a rate of growth below the rate of revenue growth. This may sound like a political statement, making a political argument about a type of fiscal policy.  Indeed, their work has important policy implications.  However, the work at its heart is a profoundly moral one: how do we learn from evidence about life-saving or life-shortening economic policies?  Can we pursue policies that break our false dichotomies that government spending is not consistent with economic growth, or that public health investments, while they may have health benefits, might harm the economy?  Their data show clearly that these dichotomies are political creations, not descriptions of economic truths.

One of the most notable of the austerity experiments occurred in former Soviet Union states after the fall of communism.  While austerity was very much en vogue among economic advisors to post-communist states, there was wide variation in the degree to which countries pursued austerity.  Across twenty-five post-communist countries between 1989 and 2002, those countries that implemented rapid mass privatization suffered increased male job losses by 56% compared with those that pursued a gradualist path (for example, Belarus, who kept poverty rates below 2% during the transition).  Furthermore, countries like Kazakhstan, Latvia, and Lithuania that engaged in rapid austerity measures experienced significant drops in life expectancy over the course of five years, while gradualist neighboring countries fared much better in terms of public health outcomes.  One of the more striking findings was that there 10 million excess deaths among Russian men attributed to austerity measures in the immediate post-Soviet era; much of that was related to joblessness.  Drs. Basu and Stuckler make compelling arguments with data that the economic and health disasters after the fall of communism were not inevitable.

Similar findings are seen with the most recent economic recession. In discussing these cases, The Body Economic provides rich evidence that health, education and social protection programs have among the highest fiscal multipliers, or money received back in economic growth for each dollar invested.  Austerity measures that cut such programs therefore have profound economic effects.  The resulting health effects—both because of the lack of health programs and because of worsening economies—is felt in the loss of life. There were 35,000 avoidable deaths in the United States during the recent Great Recession due to a lack of healthcare insurance, with 6 million Americans joining the 40 million already without coverage during this time.  During the Greek financial crisis in which austerity measures were pursued, there was a 40% rise in infant mortality and 47% rise in unmet healthcare needs between 2008 and 2011.

Their lessons are important for individuals across the political spectrum.  They put forth evidence that economic growth and investing in a robust social safety net can be mutually reinforcing rather than, as many pundits would suggest, mutually exclusive.  At a time of decreasing confidence in government around the world, their data speaks to the relevance of governments in protecting decency, health, dignity, and economic prosperity. The data implore citizens to hold their governments accountable to a robust social safety net and pro-growth strategies (including utilizing fiscal multipliers to evaluate impact and growth) during recessions while demanding of governments to be more effective in how they deliver on these policies.   After all, these are not academic matters but rather questions of life and death, prosperity and poverty.

Duncan Maru, MD, PhD, is a physician, epidemiologist, and co-founder of Nyaya Health. He works as a resident physician in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at Harvard where he is a fellow in the Global Health Equity Program.

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Waging a War Against Gender Inequity

A supply chain is a network of people and processes that will cater to the end user, whom in my case are patients in resource poor settings. I have procured critical components for aircraft and engine systems, to improving the lead time performance of solar modules for retail & municipal entities. When I arrived to my village in Rwinkwavu, Rwanda and I was given a tour of the district hospitals I would be supporting, I immediately knew I was in for an entirely different experience.  These are no longer widgets that I am procuring that will go on the roof of a building, but critical health commodities that will affect human lives.  My work has not only been incredibly challenging, but also very fulfilling. I have learned a lot about supply chain challenges on a global scale and witnessed the effects of not having the right products at the right place at the right time. The Partners In Health Pharmacy Supply Chain Team had the pleasure of attending the International Association of Public Health Logistician’s (IAPHL) fifth Global Health Supply Chain Summit in Kigali, Rwanda.

Link:

Global Health Supply Chain Summit

Politicians have talked endlessly about deficits and finance during our ongoing economic crisis. But we’ve talked far less about achieving another major goal that is just as important, if not more so, than promoting stable financial markets: protecting our health and well-being during hard times and into the future. What policies are most effective in preserving our health during economic recessions—and can we afford them? That question, it turns out, can be answered through data and careful research on recessions both past and present.

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Introducing The Body Economic

Here, I sit down with Maupin to discuss in greater detail his view of the history of primary health care initiatives and CHW program in Guatemala and Latin American. Our discussion covers a broad range of topics, including the historical factors which led to the emergence of the model, as well as the effects of first civil wars and revolutions and then neoliberal health care reform.

Tell me a bit more about your background.

Well I went to Tulane University initially for pre-med as an undergraduate – before realizing that medicine wasn’t for me! My interest in Guatemala and healthcare – and in Tulane specifically – was that my grandfather Carroll Behrhorst once taught there. He went to Guatemala in the late 1950′s as a Lutheran medical missionary. However in the 1960′s he separated from the Lutheran Church and opened a clinic in the department of Chimaltenango, which then developed into a very well known clinic, the Behrhorst Clinic. Subsequently, I went to SUNY Albany, where I did my PhD dissertation looking at community participation in health care programs. The dissertation focused primarily on community participation after the [end of the civil war] in Guatemala. Now, I’m looking at a historical perspective of primary health care initiatives in Guatemala, using the Behrhorst Clinic as an ethnographic case study to examine these issues from the 1960s to 1970s, where there was really a boom in primary health care initiative — in terms of a push for integrative development, and the number of CHWs and NGOs involved. Then I look at violence during the civil war, which decimated the clinic and the health promoter program, and which was also very formative in changing the idea of what a health promoter was. Finally, going through the 1990s, I look at the end of violence and the neoliberal health reform that went with it.

Can you elaborate a bit more on the history of the Behrhorst Clinic? Because the founding of the Behrhorst Clinic is really a foundational moment in global health.

The clinic was innovative and unique, but it was also part of this growing movement in Latin America for primary health care initiatives and ideas about comprehensive health and development programs. There’s always a bit of debate whether the Behrhorst Clinic was really the first health promoter program What was going on in Guatemala was also going on with [other community health worker programs] in Mexico and other programs throughout Central America. These movements coalesced in the 1960s and 1970s and were influential in developing the primary health care model.

The Behrhorst Clinic started out as a curative clinic. My grandfather first opened up a small clinic in Chimaltenango, he had a lot of patients coming in every day with basically the same illnesses. He would provide medicine, people would get better, and then they would come back in a month with the same issues. There was then a big turning point in his philosophy; rather than just focusing on curative medicine inside a clinic, he felt there needed to be more interventions in rural communities where people were living, focusing on they exposures and conditions that were producing bad health. So the Behrhorst Clinic started a pilot program, where they sent a group of 3 Kaqchikel Maya women who were working as nurses in the clinic to a [rural community]. They started doing community surveys, finding very high rates of tuberculosis and very poor dietary quality. That was the start of the CHW program. They recruited a couple of community members to start coming to the clinic to receive basic biomedical training so that they could diagnose common illness and provide medication. After that trial period, in the mid 1960s, they started a much larger health promoter program, recruiting participants throughout the department to come to the clinic and get a year of training in the clinic before returning to their communities.

It really does seem that health promoter programs started first in Latin America and then spread around the world? Or is that an unfair characterization? What was it about the 1960s in Latin America that allowed this model to emerge?

I think the model of what we think about as a CHW definitely has its roots in Latin America. There are other examples however from around the world that are similar; for example the “barefoot doctor” in China was going on at about the same time. In Guatemala in particular in the 1960s you had a lot of activism. There was a growing campesino movement as well as the Catholic Action movement. These factors coalesced around ideas about health and community participation to produce something that was unique.

How did these first programs get off the ground?

Funding initially was a big issue. For the Behrhorst Clinic, a private donor, World Neighbors, played a big part in financing. The Catholic Action movement was also influential, especially in the selection of the first health promoters. One misconception of CHWs that I always have a problem with is the idea that they were democratically elected and representative of their communities. But for the most part, it is hard to find programs where [that actually occurred]. In the 1960s when programs first started most of the individuals who became CHWs were nominated either by Peace Corp workers or through existing connections with the Catholic Church, where they worked as catechists as part of Catholic Action. So there was a selection of people who were already active outside of their own communities. So there was some reinforcing of power structures that already existed.

How does the history of CHW programs, in Guatemala for example, go from this initial boom in the 1960s and 1970s to where we are today?

The [civil war in Guatemala] was fundamental in transforming CHWs and health and development programs in the region, and it shaped expectations about what a CHW is. The Guatemalan government started its own program of CHWs in the 1970s, but there is very little information about it to this day. There was a point where the Behrhorst Clinic was hired to train government CHWs, but there was a lot of tension, in terms of ideas about the quality of training and responsibilities. By the late 1970s and early 1980s with the increasing scale of the violence, a significant number of CHWs were identified as being subversives just because of their acts of community organizing and health education. There were a lot of accusations of CHWs providing health care to the guerrilla…but that was really a very small portion of CHWs. The majority of CHWs were somewhat caught in the middle. So the role of CHWs during the violence is very complicated. But one pattern that came out of the time of violence, is that many CHWs were killed or disappeared or fled their communities. And those who did stay in their communities restricted their practices away from this integrative development, and they really just focused on curative medicine. So by the mid 1980s, that was largely the role and function of CHWs. And so I think that legacy continues today in rural communities in terms of what people see as a CHW position.

What happens after the war, especially as privatization and neoliberal health care reform takes off?

I think that now CHWs in the current neoliberal adjustment are being picked up on again because they have this symbolic and ideological tie to notions of democracy, stakeholding, citizen participation, which was something that was very big with primary health care in the 1970s. There are some people in the mid to late 1990s who feared that neoliberal economic reforms would essential destroy the position of the CHW, mostly because of arguments from cost effectiveness. But I think the reality is the opposite. They are cost effective, although mostly because they are now given less training than they should be, so training costs are reduced. They sort of maintain this symbolic relationship between rural communities and the government. In Guatemala at least, there is this idea that after the war, that CHWs are a means for the government to go to rural communities and try to cooperate with them and have this process of democratization.

Is this just rhetoric?

I think so. In the interviews that I’ve conducted with CHWs, I have had not had any who talk about these larger themes. Within rural communities I don’t think that people associate the [CHW model] with these larger ideas.

Now let’s turn specifically to the Guatemalan government’s efforts to outsource Ministry of Health (MOH) functions to NGOs through the SIAS program. This program has been viewed as an important model for how to conduct health care reform in the new millennium.

Under SIAS, many CHWs have been contracted, but their role has become incredibly circumscribed. The role of the CHW in the primary healthcare model as it was introduced in the 1970s was largely based on the idea that they would also serve as points of referral to higher levels of care. However a big difference was that back then CHWs [were also allowed] to provide basic curative services themselves. I think this is a world-wide pattern, that CHWs are now very restricted in what they are allowed to provide, especially in terms of medicine. In Guatemala, the SIAS system is incredibly restricted; CHWs are basically allowed only to provide only aspirin and oral rehydration therapy. So they are authorized to provide less than things that people can get for themselves.

Another element of SIAS is attempting to set up a better referral network, but I don’t know how effective that referral system is. If people who are ill do not recognize that they need to go to a higher level of care, I’m not sure how much CHWs and their referral advice actually impacts peoples’ decisions to seek higher levels of care. With the SIAS program this is sort of a numbers game. If you have a CHW who is responsible for 20 households, then you have a major proliferation of CHWs, which serves as the basis for the claim that the government are expanding rural access to healthcare very quickly even though access really hasn’t changed.

Another aspect of the SIAS program that is interesting is the adoption of conditional cash transfer approaches, mostly modeled on successful deployments of these schemes in rural Mexico.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, conditional cash transfer programs do encourage people to send their children to school, because the director of the school has to sign off on attendance forms which mothers can then turn into to receive incentive payments. Also women in rural communities have to go and have preventative health exams each month with SIAS CHW staff; staff sign off on their forms which allows them to get their monthly stipend. So this is helping some by increasing preventative care and getting children into school. But this also creates a sense of self regulation and self monitoring. Women, for example, may not want to receive certain services, such as pap smears. The CHW team is clear that they don’t have to receive the service, but if they don’t they will not receive their stipend. This forces some women; it may be encouraging preventative care, but it is a lot more regulation on people. If women are not able to attend, there is a sense that “It’s your fault.” If the child is not able to go to school, that is very much blamed on the mother. As the amount of surveillance in rural communities is increasing through this system, it is really targeted at mother. You never really see men coming in. Mothers are the sole focus. Any critiques of lack of improvement fall on the mothers.

What is the future for primary health care initiatives and CHWs programs – not just in Guatemala, but also elsewhere in the world?

My own view is that CHWs can do so much more. This idea of them being just a point of contact for initiating referrals without the training or ability to provide basic medications is a huge limitation. There is a lot of discounting the abilities of CHWs, based on the argument that it is too dangerous to allow them to provide medication or to diagnose illness. However, the evaluations of CHWs in the 1960s and 1970s were quite positive. So in my view, the role of CHWs could be expanded, especially towards providing basic curative services. Instead of being just a point of referral, they could be a source of care. There are some NGOs in Guatemala that still work with this model, but they are very few. As SIAS expands and as more NGOs opt for subcontracting relationships with the Guatemalan MOH, the CHW role will become more and more limited.

And this, in your view, is a loss?

I think so. In some municipalities in Guatemala there are still a lot of CHWs who were trained in the old model, and they are still operating their rural clinics and pharmacies. Many of them are still called “little doctors.” I don’t argue that CHWs should gain the knowledge and skills to be able to provide curative skills and then become totally independent. There needs to be some oversight. However the way CHWs are used in the SIAS program right now is a real waste of the position and doesn’t serve the needs it could.

Do you think NGOs and civil society organizations could use CHWs in more effective way?

At least in the region of Guatemala where I work, the possibility is vanishing. The history of funding for these programs has really limited the ability of NGOs to continue with CHW programs that are independent of the SIAS subcontracting model. A lot of NGOs who were opposed to the SIAS model originally have mostly converted because of the lack of funding from other sources.

Another issue is that many of the NGOs who now subcontract with the Guatemalan MOH have no experience in healthcare. Many are contracted just to serve as administrators. Part of the original deal with the SIAS model was that NGOs would continue to integrate their other more comprehensive services into the SIAS “minimal package” model. However the NGOs I’ve talked to in fact have very little integration of their subcontract responsibilities with their other core activities They mostly just work as administrators for SIAS, they are not really amplifying the basic package.

This is what has happened with the Behrhorst Clinic. They tried to remain independent at first. They were very opposed to SIAS and government contracts, and they tried to provide NGO-based alternatives. However, by the mid 2000s, primarily because of the lack of funding from other sources, they accepted the SIAS contracts. But their work as a comprehensive clinic is completely separate from their rural health work under SIAS. There is not even necessarily a referral system where the CHWs they contract and supervise under SIAS can refer patients to their clinic. So the clinic, which is historically known for its community health work and integrative approach, is now completely separated from their rural health work under a government subcontract.

This sounds tremendously unfortunate. Isn’t the whole point of being an NGO the ability to be innovative, different, focused on advocacy?

I don’t think that participating in SIAS undermines an NGO’s mission statement or philosophy towards social justice, but it also doesn’t expand it at all. NGOs that accept these contracts – the ones that I’m familiar with – they do it because of the financial security that comes along with the government contract. Even if they have a social justice philosophy, that doesn’t affect the way they approach the government contract.

Photo by Stephen Bailey

ANIRUDRA has spent 30 years trying not to make Nepal’s children cry – often failing.

He has carried out vaccinations on the country’s ‘Babus’ and ‘Nanus’ around 240,000 times. He tries to soothe the children by distracting them with a clicking tongue and a few soothing words as the needle goes in.

The 53-year-old has made his own significant contribution to making the country Polio free and is still going strong.

Anirudra Kayastha, from Bhaktapur near Kathmandu, grew into the job helping his father. He went with him on the smallpox vaccination programme to then very isolated areas in Kavre and Sindhupalchok. He then started work himself aged 23 with the Expanded Programme on Immunization, which was set up by the World Health Organisation.

He had the hard job of walking door-to-door in the villages around the Kathmandu Valley. Anirudra had to persuade sometimes reluctant parents to let this stranger stick his strange medicine into their children.

“It was very difficult to convince people and I had to do a certain number each day,” he said.

The injections and oral doses were for Polio, DPT (Diptheria, Whooping Cough and Tetanus), Tetanus, Measles and BCG (Tuberculosis). Over the years, he worked for various Government family planning clinics and health facilities, mostly in the Kathmandu Valley area.

For the last 20 years he has worked at Siddhi Memorial Foundation, which runs a non-profit hospital for women and children in his home town. The vaccinations are done free of charge through the Government of Nepal’s National Immunization Programme.

“I am satisfied with the job I have had. I feel I have done good work,” said Anirudra, a father of three. “In the past, people gave birth to so many children but only one or two survived. Children died of tetanus within 72 hours. We had cases of Polio. I don’t see these things anymore. I have made a good contribution to that.”

Thanks to the hard work of people like Anirudra the incidence of all the diseases he vaccinated against has drastically reduced. Nepal had its last Polio case in 2010. The World Health Organisation will declare the country polio-free only after all its neighbours in South East Asia have also been Polio free for three years.

So Anirudra is still at work at Siddhi Memorial Hospital. During the early years he administered around 4,500 injections and oral doses a year, which has now risen to more than 20,000 a year. It’s impossible to say for sure how many he has done. But a rough average of 12,000 a year for 20 years would be around 240,000 injections.

He now also vaccinates for Japanese Encephalitis (JE), Hepatitis and MMR as the country tries to further expand its coverage.

“Preventing infections is very important,” he said. “I am experienced in holding the baby and making the injection so the child feels little pain and it reduces the risk of infection.”

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What is Social and Solidarity Economy and why does it matter?

“I shouldn’t tell you this, but I don’t even know who our safety captain is,” I told a GHC staff member over the phone as I “sheltered in place” in my boyfriend’s room in Cambridge, MA last Friday. At our initial orientation at Yale, we were grouped by our placement countries to discuss emergency plans and identify safety captains. Fellows based in Africa diligently discussed contingency plans for civil strife, riots, and natural disasters, already planning where they would hide $100 USD in a safe place should evacuation be necessary. In the US group, I wasn’t the only one checking my phone under the table, feeling like I didn’t have much to worry about it.

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What to expect when you’re not expecting: Reflections from Boston

By Pierre Massat (ITM, Quamed) Last Friday the Belgian Directorate General for Development Cooperation (DGD) organized a conference entitled “Development Cooperation in the Health Sector: Still the same approach ?” While the goal was mainly to discuss how the Belgian development cooperation in the health sector should adjust to the differences between low-income countries, fragile states and (a growing number of) middle-income countries, the conference protagonists also used the occasion to take a critical look at today’s development cooperation in general in Belgium. Two speakers were invited: Dr. Georges Dallemagne, member of the Chamber of Representatives (CDH), former Director-General of Handicap International, former Vice-Director-General of MSF), and Prof. Dr. Bruno Gryseels, Director of ITM.

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Development cooperation post-2015: from switching the poles to ditching the…

This is a guest post by the computational epidemiologist Dr. John Ayers: Most of us are aware of the “big data” revolution fueled by electronic information. It has been suggested that big data, along with hypothesis-free methods popularized by films such as Moneyball, will allow for an unprecedented growth of knowledge across disciplines, including epidemiology and preventive medicine. While I am a bit more circumspect in expectations (there is no substitute for survey data in many cases), I do believe that electronic data collected for a fraction of the cost of survey data can work hand-in-hand with research derived from more traditional sources. Our study, published this month in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, is a great example of the complementarity of big data approaches to mental health research

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Big data mining and new hypotheses in mental health research

The launch of TTWUD at King’s College London

It was the morning of April 15^th and, as has happened so often lately, I was in a quagmire of sorts and needed my grandmother, a former headmistress in the kingdom of Busoga –Uganda, to come to my rescue. God bless her soul. When I needed to cook grasshoppers for the company potluck in Oxford last year, she was on the other side of the phone, patiently and painstakingly taking me through the intricate cooking ritual for grasshoppers. They were a smash hit. When I had to do a consultancy job on social protection and cash transfers, I had an enlightening talk with her about senior citizen’s grants. This time, I needed her to give me moral support and a pep talk on community participation in health but she was stuck on pedology…the study of soils and children. She is eager to be the limo driver at my wedding and for me to procure her great-grandchildren. She just had a bumper harvest of beans and maize in her small farm in Jinja. Anyway, at the very end of our phone chat, she wished me well and asked me to ‘knock ‘em dead’, in reference to the competition.

I was asked to present at the launch of Lord Nigel Crisp’s website on how we can use local partnerships to foster the delivery of healthcare in both developing and developed countries. In addition to that, I was asked to make a case, on behalf of Doctors For Africa, for the engagement of the Africans in the diaspora in improving healthcare in Africa. The event was organized in the sparkling format of BBC’s Dragons’ Den. The BBC’s Dragons’ Den show allows several entrepreneurs an opportunity to present their varying business ideas to a panel of five wealthy investors, the “Dragons” of the show’s title, and pitch for financial investment offering a stake of the company in return. This event was a sort of global health Dragon’s Den with a focus on health partnerships and co-development but with no financial investments on offer. Scintillating, yes?

The ‘dragons’  in this case were Harvard University’s Prof Paul Farmer, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Maureen Bisognano, Dr Fiona Goodlee,who is the Chief Editor of the British Medical Journal, and Dr Charles Alessi, the chairman of the UK’s National Association for Primary Care.

Beautifully suited and sporting a one-day old tan from the previous day’s capricious London sun, I walked into the event venue – The Strand Campus at King’s College London- with a healthy mixture of excitement and trepidation. The event had been heavily advertised, the 300 seats available had been scooped up in record time and it was going to be live-streamed on the internet. The audience was the kind armed with weapons of mass salvation…fatal to mediocrity. There was really no pressure at all.

My fellow contestants seemed, and turned out to be, immensely capable and thoroughly convincing. I was the last to go to the podium, so I felt I was the resident Tyrion Lannister (from HBO’s Game of Thrones) as they talked, in quick succession, with intellect, finesse and polish. Dr Matt Harris from Imperial College London made a compelling case for learning from community health workers in Brazil. Dr Shyams Syed from WHO Patient Safety was spot on with his pitch for shared learning in safety partnerships with Africa. Francis Kaikumba, from the African Health Policy Network, spoke fluidly on their magnificent work in health promotion in Africa, using faith-based alliances, and how it can be applied to the UK.

After a series of questions and comments from the audience and the twitteratti, about the previous presentations, Dan Knights and Felicity Jones, two enthusiastic medical students, talked about the work of Pallium India on palliative care and how it could and, indeed should, be applied to the UK.

Professor Parveen Kumar, president of the Royal Society of Medicine and Consultant surgeon Babulal Sethia campaigned for the use of electives and medical education to foster health partnerships.  Dr Rashad Massoud, from the US-based University Research Council, on the other hand, talked about their work in Russia in the Health Care Improvement (HCI) Project that assists national and local programs to scale up evidence-based interventions and improve health outcomes.

By the time I took to the lectern, I had tremendous respect and admiration for the speakers before me. I was honoured to be part of this eminent group and I said as much in my opening remarks. Anyone who has read the “A Song of the Fire & Ice” novels by George R.R. Martin or has watched an episode of the HBO’s Game of Thrones television will understand that you sometimes learn more from your competitive peers and ‘enemies’ than from anyone else. Personal relationships, strategic thinking and open-mindedness are the key elements to the success of the House of Stark…and life in general.

In 2010, Africa received a total of $43 billion in overseas development aid from developed countries. Africans in the diaspora sent back $50 billion to Africa through official channels. It is believed that this was only 25% of the actual remittance from the African diaspora, the rest being sent through informal channels. In 2012, Africans in the diaspora sent back $60 billion and this figure, as has been for several years, is more than what Africa as a whole received in the form of overseas development aid. That speaks volumes.

Presumably, some of these remittances are spent on healthcare in Africa. How can we tap into this money and put it to a more focused and impact-oriented use? Apparently, health workers of African origin make up around 20% of the workforce of the UK’s NHS. They have an economic, cultural and philosophical attachment to Africa that is robust and long-lasting. How can that be put to good use to improve healthcare in both Africa and the UK?  I gave the example of the bespoke wooden crutches being made by local partners in collaboration with the orthopaedic surgeons at Uganda’s main national referral medical facility- Mulago Hospital. This is being done through the help of the Ugandan diaspora. There is so much potential. Untapped and unfettered, it is. And Africans in the diaspora are feverishly looking for partnerships that can foster this potential and improve the health status of Africans.

Lord Nigel Crisp, former Chief Executive of the NHS and Permanent Secretary of the UK Department of Health, believes that, above all, we need to work on improving global partnerships in healthcare – to find ways to learn from each other, combine developments from countries around the world and start thinking in terms of co-development and not the increasingly out of date and top-down concept of international development. To this end, he has published a book entitled Turning The World Upside Down and this event was a forum to launch his similarly-titled website. The website is peppered with extraordinary examples of new ideas and practices in health from disease-prone countries, which we can all learn, wherever we live, and provides the space for discussion and debate. It is worth looking at. A recording of the event is here and I appear 1 hour 19 minutes into the video.  Enjoy and/or cringe.

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Health Poverty Action principally works in Nyaruguru district, a remote and hard-to-reach region of Rwanda much in need of social services and improved infrastructures. In this short video, I present Kibeho, a small town in Nyaruguru district with a fascinating history of war and religion and a promising future.

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My title at my GHC placement is the ‘policy assistant.’ I applied to this position because I wanted to see what it would be like to affect change for a large number of people through policy changes, instead of having a smaller, though no less important, reach through on the ground community work. I really had no experience in policy at all before starting this job, and didn’t really know what to expect. I thought I might ease into it, reading some of the organization’s policies, possibly learning about policy creation, or something of that nature. Instead, I jumped into the deep end and read the Affordable Care Act.

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The Expert in Health Care Reform… Theoretically.

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