I am at a meeting of the GAVI Civil Society Steering Group – a group of NGOs and community groups which advises the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation. After the huge success of the Pledging Conference in London last month, we need to make sure donors also recognise the (much more difficult) challenge of building health systems in developing countries.
The 2nd Global Forum on Human Resources for Health begins tomorrow in Bangkok. Health workers will be at the centre of the debate…
Very often, researchers write and discuss their papers between themselves, and their fabulous analysis fails to translate into practice and is not taken up by policy makers.
If we want to help children and their families, it’s important that we don’t fall into this trap and produce work/ papers/ tools that are useful rather than gathering dust in some basement cupboard.
Here in Melbourne, Save the Children Australia is playing a very active part in the UN DPI/NGO conference on global health. Today Jasmine Whitbread and I took part in a discussion about the Millennium Development Goals and lessons learned for any targets which might apply after 2015.
There is a growing realisation that in order to strengthen health systems, the gap between HIV research and programme implementation and other health needs must be closed and programmes have to be integrated with other sectors.
Working in Mozambique a couple of years ago, I met a woman who, every month, walked overnight in order to receive her antiretroviral medication at the district hospital – a remarkable endeavour, albeit not that exceptional for people in remote communities in many parts of the developing world. In a lot more cases, distance can have deadly consequences…
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first female President of Liberia (and indeed the first female President in Africa!), is talking at the World Health Assembly (WHA) right now. She is absolutely inspiring: reiterating that people should not have to die because they are poor, that mothers should not be faced with the impossible choice of feeding their family or saving the life of their child. She is calling again for free health services.
‘Health systems research’… It’s sometimes easy to be put off by the technical jargon, but work in this field can play a very important role in making health care available to those who need it most.
I attended a two day workshop last week organised by the Global Fund on the joint platform to strengthen health systems. The Global Fund wanted to update civil society (mainly ‘northern’ NGOs with a few representatives from ‘southern’ civil society) on the progress of the initiative and get our views on the direction the platform should take.
On a field visit to Northern Thailand, I get a front row seat to a drama being performed by a group of children who live among the orange plantations. They tell us that they will re-enact a common story from their village. The children are not much older than my own child, they’re in costumes, they are doing quite good impressions of parents, and I get lulled for a few moments into thinking I’m watching the type of entertaining drama my son and his friends would put on. But then the child playing the pregnant woman in the drama starts to mimic the pains of a medical emergency.
