Live from the Pacific Health Summit
06/24/2010
Journalist John Donnelly blogs from London at this exclusive forum where global leaders meet
June 22 Leaders Challenged to Save Mothers and Newborns
June 23 Part 1: Men's Sexual Pleasure Vs. Saving Women's Lives
June 23 Part 2: Voices from Nigeria
June 23 Part 3: Summit Talk: Dr. Wang Yu
June 23 Part 4: Summit Talk: Christy Turlington Burns
June 23 Part 5: Dominic Chavez Photo Exhibit
June 23 Part 6: Dr. Margaret Chan: 'I Have Never Heard a Room so Quiet'
June 24: Part 7: One Path to Take: Universal Health Coverage
June 24: Part 8: A Meeting of `Unlike Minds'
June 24: Part 9: Summit talk: Jeffrey Sturchio
June 25: Part 10: Summit talk: Chevron's Dr. James Allen
Part 10: Summit Talk: Chevron Medical Director for Asia Pacific Dr. James Allen
At the Pacific Health Summit, Dr. James Allen, Asia Pacific medical director for the Chevron Corp., said at one session that his "greatest fear" was that the summit would be all talk and no action: "That's an embarrassment I don't want to experience." After the summit, John Donnelly talked to him about that, as well as other impressions from the meeting.
Dr. James Allen in the field.
Q: Will the discussions at the summit lead to something tangible?
A: A couple of concrete things came up for me - one with GE Healthcare and its ultrasound device. Their work and training in low-income countries is something we may interested in. We work with a hospital in Sichuan province (in China) and we purchased a CT scanner for them. One of my primary concerns in investing in health care in low-resource settings is how to make it effective over time. I've seen plenty of rusted-out equipment sitting unused. But if we have a long-term agreement with GE that involves training, that may be more practical.
Another convergence that occurred was with Vikram Kuman, chairman of Dimagi, which works with mobile phone technologies. We have a series of relationships with clinics in Indonesia. I forwarded his Website and links to one of our corporate social responsibility people at headquarters, and they are very interested.
Q: During the meeting, a legislator from Nigeria, Saudata Sani, called on oil companies to make a major investment in training health workers. What's your response?
A: I talked with her later that day at the Buckingham Palace reception, and said, ‘If we trained doctors and nurses, could they be fairly compensated and would there be a viable system in which they could work?' She agreed there was a problem. When we try to address a basic need in a society like that with health-care workers, we need an effective partnership with government.
We have one example in Vietnam. We worked in a partnership with the American Academy for Family Physicians, the Boston University School of Medicine, the government of Vietnam, and Can Tho medical university to train family physicians. We created a curriculum over three years and the doctors at the end were certified as specialists in family medicine. We worked with the ministry of health so that was recognized as a specialty. That kind of multi-lateral approach is necessary to build human capacity.
Q: Chevron has a long history in Myanmar or Burma. How does that work?
A: We are the only U.S. company working there. We were grandfathered in, as we started work in the early 1980s there. We're working in two areas.
The first is that we support more than 20 clinics that serve a population of 45,000, giving them free health care, reaching immunization rates of over 98 percent for children, and regular checkups for vision and hearing. That's unheard of in that part of the world. We support a government hospital, schools and an income generation project. I've visited there 10 times in the last 15 years, and people have moved into the pipeline area. When I first went there in 1997, there was still some fighting outside of that area. I asked a village leader about why there was not fighting in the village, and he said, ‘They don't fight where we have village clinics.' So I thought why don't we build more clinics? We did. We went from 11 to 23 clinics.
The second area, totally unrelated, is work with the NGO Pact, which works in microcredit. They found that in the Dry Zone, many people were dying of TB before they could pay off their loans. We agreed to work with them as long as we developed a primary health care scheme. We have reached more than 1 million people with that program, and now the TB detection rates are very high, and the numbers of patient dropping out is lower than anywhere else in the country.
Q: What do you think was the value of the summit?
A: It brings different people from different backgrounds together. I was talking with people from a couple of different organizations, and three times people said to me, ‘Well, maybe we could do something because after all, you are not our competitors.' After the third time someone said that to me, I thought, ‘Well, should any one really be competing on health (in poor countries)?' Maybe that is kind of flippant, but we had people working at high levels in their organizations at the summit and they can make a fundamental impact by working together.
Q: Why do you do what you do?
A: My focus is on the employee health in Chevron. But the resources and needs of the
company long-term allow me to use what we do for employees to reach into communities as well. It's a great privilege to work for a company that has the resources and can impact in so many places to do good things. That's what me keeps going.
Summit talk: Jeffrey Sturchio
Jeffrey Sturchio is the President and CEO of the Global Health Council. He took over the job 10 months ago, after being a longtime leader at Merck & Co. He spoke with John Donnelly about his thoughts on the Pacific Health Summit as well as the G-8/G-20 summits in Canada.
Q: What was important to you about the Pacific Health Summit?
A: What's interesting about this conference is it really combines people from industry, all the international organizations, NGOs, and people on the front lines, and we're all trying to deal with the terrible problem of literally millions of mothers and children dying unnecessarily every year. There have been tremendous opportunities here, but it's also frustrating at the same time.
Q: What's frustrating?
A: It seems the same people are going around the world to the same talking shop. Everyone talks about the problem, agrees how it reflects a human tragedy, but then there seems to be a kind of a short circuit before anything really happens. The real challenge for everyone here is to figure out if we know what works, what can be done, why it isn't being done, and identifying the obstacles.
Q: What about the opportunities?
A: We just had an interesting session with some concrete examples of how people brought together appropriate resources and partners with a large enough scale. The Helping Babies Breathe project is a great example: They reduced it to simple elements that can be used by virtually anybody to help an infant in distress, and paired it with a newborn simulator - essentially a doll that breaths and cries - and they want to get it the hands of hundreds of thousands of midwives so that many more babies will be resuscitated.
In general, the frustrating thing about global health is this mismatch between having the evidence of simple solutions that work versus the inability of the global community to bring those solutions to scale. We have a lot of attention to discovery and development of drugs and technologies. But if you look at delivery of interventions, there hasn't been anywhere near the same focus.
Q: With the G-8 summit in Canada about to open, much of the discussion has been around funding, not improving delivery or making health systems more efficient. Why?
A: Being more efficient with our funding is incredibly important, but you have to look at the financing question, too. We heard Anne Mills (a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) refer to data on how much countries spend on health - and in poor countries, it's $12 per person per year. For those countries, you‘ve got to come up with more money. What's important at the G-8 will be to see what the countries will pledge and then later to make sure they follow up on their commitments.
June 24: Part 8
A Meeting of 'Unlike Minds'
By John Donnelly
When the Pacific Health Summit wrapped up late this week, Joy Lawn, a well-known researcher for Save the Children based in South Africa, called it a "meeting of unlike minds."
"For some of us, the bottom line is saving lives," she said. "For others, the bottom line is making money. But I think that you sometimes need to get unlike minds together to get something done.''
After three days of sessions involving 250 leaders in industry and global health, questions trailed the crowd going out the door, with many wondering whether the talk would result in action. But one session near the end of the proceedings generated a great deal of enthusiasm and some pointed back-and-forth observations.
It featured industry representatives showing possible breakthrough technology - as well as frustrated global health workers who said that they still weren't getting already known life-saving solutions to the people who needed them.
Some of the highlights:
- An ultrasound machine not much bigger than a cell phone that could be used for pregnancies as well as scans of the heart, kidneys and liver. "It has a huge potential in completely changing the way care is delivered,'' said Omar Ishrak, president and CEO of healthcare systems at GE Healthcare, which invented it. Added William Castell, Wellcome Trust chairman, who put the ultrasound machine against his chest and showed his beating heart to the crowd: "I think it's going to be as ubiquitous as a stethoscope in 10 years. It really allows us to take medicine to the bush."
- A newborn simulator and a new training manual that could help teach birth attendants in developing countries the essential skills in resuscitating newborns, said Tore Laerdal, chairman of Laerdal Medical. The simulator will cost about $50, he said. An estimated 1 million babies die each year from the inability to breathe immediately after delivery. He also showed a new penguin-shaped suction tool to remove mucus from a baby's air passageway; current bulb suction tools are difficult to clean and can pass on infections.
- A new system of sending out voice-activated SMS messages over cell phones in developing countries to pregnant women during the various stages of their pregnancy, said Tina Sharkey, chairman and global president of BabyCenter. "We can send a message every week, personalizing to the week of her stage," Sharkey said.
Some people in the audience, while applauding the initiatives, questioned why they are having trouble getting already existing tools to their hospitals and health centers.
Dr. Mutinta Lina Muyuni of the department of obstetrics and gynaecology at University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka, Zambia, said she agreed that more birth attendants should be trained, and it would be great to get the newborn simulators, but she added: "We don't even have the suction bulbs in most places now!"
"I have a concern about our direction to start reaching the MDGs now," she said, referring to the Millennium Development Goals. "Why are we moving like snails toward them? We don't have suction machines, or simple delivery kits for birth. We have gone a step further here than the simple interventions - and we need those interventions."
And yet Dr. Abhay Bang, director of the Society for Education, Action and Research in Community Health in India, said he believed some of the new technologies could have huge impact - if systems were put in place to deliver them and train staff. "Many of these are liberating technologies and could help a woman somewhere in Africa or a man in India, from their current darkness or dependence,'' he said. ``But we will need training, and education, so those villagers will stay empowered from technology."
June 24: Part 7
One Path to Take: Universal Health Coverage
By John Donnelly
What's the best way to improve health care for mothers and children in the developing world? Several people at the Pacific Health Summit in London this week suggested the drive toward universal health care.
Cesar Victora, professor of epidemiology at the Federal University of Pelotas in Brazil, said that his country had virtually no coverage for the poorest people in the late 1980s. In 1989, a new constitution was passed, saying health care for a right for all, but still little happened. But when the country came up with a plan to send 100,000 health teams, including doctors, to all areas of the country, with financial incentives to serve in poor areas, coverage soared. In 1995, he said, 70 percent of the poorest pregnant mothers delivered a baby with a skilled birth attendant; a decade later, that figure soared to 97 percent.
"Brazil does not depend on donors - we can afford our health care," he said. "This is important because we can set our own rules. We have a strong policy - no user fees - and we can afford not to listen to such advice from outsiders."
In Thailand, Suwit Wibulpolprasert, senior advisor on disease control at the Office of the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Public Health, said universal health care is "possible even in low-income countries. Countries like Cuba and Tanzania had universal health care long before us."
Political will, he said, was the key factor in instituting coverage. In 2001, after national elections, the new government decided to offer universal health care for everything except cosmetic services and most organ transplants. "The World Bank advised us, `You will go bankrupt.' We are lucky that we don't believe them. At least they gave us the challenge to be careful. At least we can move on - with universal coverage."
And David de Ferranti, president and founder of Results for Development Institute (R4D), a Washington, D.C., group that works on development issues around the world, said that Rwanda and Ghana, both using health insurance schemes, showed that countries could quickly scale up health care access.
In addition, he said that the Ministerial Leadership Initiative for Global Health (MLI) along with R4D and other donors, was helping Mali start to expand its health insurance scheme and has assisted Sierra Leone in late April to launch free health care for pregnant women, breast-feeding mothers, and children under the age of five. The Sierra Leone initiative has greatly expanded services to poor families; in the days after the launch, the numbers of sick children receiving health care quadrupled in some large hospitals.
"We need to make the transition away from out-of-pocket payments to a system where the cost is shared," de Ferranti said. "Instead of 5 percent who are sick buying the services, you can have 100 percent share in the cost of the services."
June, 23, Part 6
Dr. Margaret Chan: 'I Have Never Heard a Room so Quiet'
By John Donnelly
When the world sees Dr. Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization, she often is giving an update on a pandemic outbreak or outlining her priorities in her job as the United Nations' leading health policymaker. The appearances are largely dry and straightforward.
But Dr. Chan also holds strong if closely-held convictions about her job, which she has held for three-and -a-half years, and she is not shy in expressing frustrations among her inner circle about things that should be going well but aren't.
At the Pacific Health Summit, a hand-picked gathering of 250 leaders in health and industry, she opened up about some of her frustrations - and asked those at the London event to do better at working together and helping developing countries, especially when it came to reducing maternal and newborn deaths.
"We are not walking our talk," she said in remarks during a luncheon which were off-the-record, but later cleared for this publication. "We must collectively remember that women are dying every minute during childbirth, while we are still fighting each other because of duplication and competition."
The room went silent - not even the sound of silverware on plate.
"I have never heard a room so quiet," she said. Some laughed quietly, many remained silent. "WHO," she said, "would like to be a partner and work with you."
But competition and infighting over who gets credit for programs wasn't the only thing on her mind. She also said that countries were crying out for support to back their own initiatives, but donors and international NGOs and foundations often wouldn't.
"We are not recognizing the importance of country ownership," she said. "Parachuting in and telling them what to do isn't the right approach. We have not done that well'' in supporting country health priorities.
And she said the efforts to save an estimated 350,000 lives of women who die every year while giving birth, and more than 3 million babies who die soon after birth, were woefully under-financed. U.S. advocates have called on the Obama administration to spend $1.3 billion on maternal and child health in 2010.
Chan, while speaking favorably about the U.S. administration, said $1.3 billion "is peanuts. Look at all the bailouts." She also suggested that people in developing countries need to demand more health services for women and children. "To provide health care for the people is the government's responsibility," she said. "The world's citizens need to talk and they don't need to take things lying down."
On this day in London, Chan, too, wasn't going to remain silent, either.
June 23, Part 5
Dominic Chavez's Photo Exhibit
By John Donnelly
At the Pacific Health Summit in London, there are no women from the developing world who just gave birth in perilous circumstances.
But their images are here.
In one room at No. 1 Great George St. in Westminster, photojournalist (and my longtime colleague) Dominic Chavez's pictures from Sierra Leone, Senegal, and Nigeria are immediate, disturbing, and emotional. He shot most of them while on assignment for the Ministerial Leadership Initiative for Global Health (MLI), an organization that is supporting Ministries of Health in five countries, often working on reproductive health issues.
In his exhibit, there's a nurse in Sierra Leone with her forefinger on the chest of a tiny newborn, attempting to restart his heart. There's a woman hanging off a delivery table, exhausted after giving birth. There's another woman also soon after delivery, with a pool of blood around her feet.
During one session here, Dr. Abhay Bang, director of the Society for Education, Action and Research in Community Health in Gadchiroli, India, told a large session in an upstairs room that in the absence of poor women in developing countries, all Summit participants should work "in alignment with the people's agenda."
Downstairs, in the room with Chavez's photographs, anyone looking for an agenda to help women will find plenty of inspiration.
June 23, Part 4
Summit Talk: Christy Turlington Burns
Christy Turlington Burns, an American model (she hates the term supermodel), started her advocacy on health issues in the mid-1990s after her father, a lifelong smoker, died of lung cancer. She first worked on smoking cessation campaigns. For the last several years, after experiencing complications when she was giving birth, she has worked to get more attention to maternal and newborn mortality. This year, she produced a documentary, No Women, No Cry, about the risks pregnant women face in four countries. She spoke with John Donnelly at the Pacific Health Summit in London.
Q: Why did you make this film?
A: A film is such a great tool to get people to gather together, hear a lot of dialogue, and see through individual stories what we are talking about - the story of health care workers and pregnant women, and the importance of giving support to the women. Everyone here at the Summit is talking about how important it is to go into the field. I think the film is a way to bring what happens on the ground to people. Civil society is really not engaged in these issues. It's only because they do not know the risks; someone who has a complication as I did, you feel so grateful, and that makes you want to do something about it.
Q: What are you advocating for on behalf of women in the developing world? Is it more funding?
A: It's not just funding. I love this idea of collaborative partnerships. When there is a receptive ministry of health working with a university and an NGO, and those groups come together, that's where I see this lasting change. In Tanzania, there's an amazing group called Women's Dignity Project, which teaches a right-to-health concept and that allows people on the village level to demand services. I'd like to see more of that. There's also a corporate piece that's important - we heard the gentlemen from Chevron and Johnson & Johnson, who talked about being invested in communities where they are working. If they help with that infrastructure piece, or the training of health workers, that is really critical.
Q: How do you handle requests from multiple groups wanting you to help them?
A: I came from a career where that was a pitfall. I'm also looking for help. I'm trying to influence policy in U.S. around the Global MOMS Act (which calls for a comprehensive U.S. government strategy to reduce mortality and improve maternal and newborn health through the Global Health Initiative).
Q: Why are you getting a Masters in Public Health at the Mailman School at Columbia University?
A: It gives me integrity. A lot of celebrities are doing things - and I hate to be categorized in that area. ... I wanted to go deeper - contribute solutions, and participate, and getting more of an education would help me do that.
June 23, Part 3
Summit Talk: Dr. Wang Yu
Dr. Wang Yu has been director general of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention since 2004. Dr. Wang, a specialist in viral immunology and molecular virology, oversees a national staff of 2,200 workers. Nationwide, China's CDC has 200,000 workers. He spoke with John Donnelly at the Pacific Health Summit in London about his priorities on the job.
Q: What are you most concerned about in your work?
A: China, as you know, has a huge population. We have had two challenges - one is our economic development has happened so quickly, but the other is that our social development is relatively lagging far behind the economic development. So, public health, education, all the social affairs - for all of that the development is uneven.
Q: Your health system was tested with the outbreak of SARS. How has that affected the development of building up a public health system?
A: In the cities, we have advanced fairly quickly. But when you get several hundred kilometers from our cities, you can see the rural areas are far behind. After SARS, the government gave strong support for public health measures. When we grew very concerned about the H1N1 pandemic, we also reacted very successfully. But there's no doubt that our public health system is weak - especially compared to the pace of economic development. We make a joke - although it's not really a joke: For building every one kilometer on highway, that is almost equal to a year's expenditure for a province's public health budget.
Q: Why come to the Pacific Health Summit?
A: We want to use it for communication, to let others know what's going on in China, to hear out concerns. We also want to get some new ideas.
Q: Any good ones?
A: Well, yesterday, I was talking to GE about their small ultrasound machine. In big cities, big machines for ultrasound are fine. But in small places, the big machines won't work. So these machines might be a good idea for us. We also want to know much more about how to prevent HIV being transmitted from the mother to child - how to best deliver that service. China's situation is very different from Africa - we have more capacity in general, but we need to do much more to prevent the transmission of HIV to babies. We need more resources from our government so we can deliver public health to the undeveloped and poor areas.
Voices from Nigeria
By John Donnelly
The Pacific Health Summit, an exclusive, invitation-only meeting of titans of industry and global health, isn't well-known in the global health circles. Many vaguely see it as a gathering mostly for leaders to hobnob and align their agendas.
But at each summit, voices from the developing world often wrest control of center stage, adding a powerful jolt to the meeting.
Saudatu Sani did that today in London. She is from Nigeria's north, Kaduna state, a member of Nigeria's House of Representatives and the only woman among the state's 16-member delegation.
This is how she introduced herself: "I come from a country where women die when they are bringing life."
That got everyone's attention. When the discussion at a morning session veered toward oil company's and other industry's responsibility to communities in which they work, Sani, whose country is oil-rich but per-capita-poor, said: "When we see oil, we start crying. Because it doesn't reflect peace, it reflects money for men, money for men, money for men."
She addressed the number of oil executives in the room: "You have to start thinking about training skilled health workers for countries that need health workers. In Nigeria, we want to know about how many people you have trained?"
There was no direct answer from them, but other voices raised to support her point. Sani's countryman, Babatunde Osotimehin, a former Minister of Health in Nigeria, also said that outsiders and the government needed to work more closely with communities in order to empower them.
He gave an example of how Nigeria has been able to make great gains in fighting polio in the last year. "We know how to do this technically - that as doctors and nurses all we had to do is give polio drops to children. But it wasn't working well. The moment we changed paradigm, and went back to community, and got the community leaders to take care of immunization, everything changed," he said. "We had 253 cases in the first quarter 2009, and that dropped to three in first quarter of 2010."
Men's Sexual Pleasure Vs. Saving Women's Lives
By John Donnelly
Jeremy Shiffman, a newly hired associate professor of public administration and policy at American University in Washington, wanted to compare the funding of maternal and newborn health in the developing world to something the Western world could understand.
So he chose the market for erectile dysfunction drugs.
His finding, which he discussed Wednesday at the Pacific Health Summit in London: The amount of money spent in the erectile dysfunction market was four times greater than the amount spent on maternal and newborn health in poor countries.
Spending more on the sexual pleasure for wealthy men mostly in the West versus keeping alive mothers and children in poor countries? Shiffman didn't have trouble explaining it.
"It seems like a gross injustice, but the people who formed the markets for erectile dysfunction are economically and political powerful, while the women and children who die in developing countries have no economic and social power, and politicians can ignore them easily - as can CEOs, although there are many CEOs here who have chosen not to ignore it."
Shiffman's perspective kicked off the second day of the 48-hour summit, which has brought together 250 leaders in global health and private industry.
He said he hoped the summit would be more than talk. "I would argue this issue has to be politicized, and we can't simply remain in the realm of feel- good humanitarian action. Talk is really cheap. Who out there is not going to support newborn and maternal survival?" he said. "I don't believe the global attention, either.
It's marvelous, and we're moving in a way in which maternal and newborn health is getting more traction in the world than before, but global attention is the second
most important thing."
What's most important?
"It's action at the national, sub-national and district level - where the local government budget officials, the civil society organizations, the women groups mobilize and demand of their governments that if enough isn't done to stop maternal and neonatal deaths, that is a violation of the social contract, and you will be held accountable if the situation persists."
Leaders Challenged to Save Mothers and Newborns
By John Donnelly
In the grand dining room of No. 1 Great George Street, an Edwardian building near the U.K. Houses of Parliament in Westminster, the 6th annual Pacific Health Summit opened last night with discussion of tragedies that often unfold in mud huts around the world - maternal and newborn deaths.
These off-the-record sessions, notable not just for their setting but rather for who sits in the seats (organizers each year hand-pick 250 leaders in global health and the corporate world), are designed to foster collaborations to improve the health of those most in need around the world. This year, the focus is maternal and newborn health; multi-drug resistant tuberculosis and nutrition were the subjects for two years prior.
And so those in the room last night heard lots of talk about `challenges' - which meant personal challenges to each one to get involved in a meaningful way.
Where do they start? And how is the world doing on maternal and child health?
That's what Hans Rosling set to find out. Rosling, whose TED talks have made him a mini-celebrity beyond the global health world, is a professor of international health at Karolinska Institutet and director of Gapminder Foundation.
His answer: Things were improving markedly since 1970 - but not for women and infants everywhere.
He started with a graphic that had large and small balls representing countries and the numbers of children per woman in 1970. As he sped through the years, using a computer program, and making the balls dive lower in the chart illustrating fewer children per woman over time, he said that the fertility rate in most countries is less than three children.
"A complete success story? No, not complete," he said, pointing to a number of outlying countries that had fertility rates from five to seven children per woman.
So it was with his other graphics - most of the world registering lower fertility and fewer maternal and newborn deaths, but substantial numbers of countries still left behind with high death burdens. Rosling, though, predicted one positive technology that could reduce maternal and infant deaths in rural areas - the rapid spread of cell phones in poor countries.
"The great news, we have is the cell phone,'' he said." Within a decade, we've been able to cut away the distance, and get news out immediately.''
Tachi Yamada, president of the Global Health Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, (he and others quoted in these live blogs on the summit agreed to go on the record), said that in order to reduce the deaths of an estimated 3 million newborn children and 350,000 women in childbirth, new technologies were needed - and old ones needed to be used more widely.
"These can be very, very simple - a clean knife to cut the umbilical cord,'' he said. Or, it could involve `microbiomics' - an emerging field using new molecular technologies to address the complexities of infections in humans.
Two weeks ago, Yamada said he was in India looking at a General Electrics' handheld ultrasound machine "that could be taken to the field and be applied. How many lives can be saved with this?''
Just as important, he said, was improving the delivery of already known interventions, such as efforts to prevent the transmission of HIV from mother to child during delivery. "Only 40 percent of all the eligible babies are now covered," he said. And, he noted, researchers have estimated that 18 percent of maternal mortality were HIV-positive mothers who had inadequate treatment during pregnancy and delivery.
Then Yamada asked those in the corporate world to do more to save mothers and children in poor countries. "Many of you work in industry. There has to be a commitment from you to work in this space," he said. "... One way is to sell these products of yours to the poorest of the poor for an affordable price."
What about the small ultrasound machine? Yamada told the group that he's already raised it with a GE executive in the room.
John Donnelly is a free-lance writer based in Washington, D.C.
Saving “This Tiny Planet”, a workshop sponsored by the Foundation for the Future.
http://www.futurefoundation.org/programs/nty_wrk3.htm
The proceedings of the workshop, including transcipts of all presentations and dialogic sessions, is available for download (4.3MB PDF).
— Steven Earwl Salmony on 2010-06-23
John- Thanks for a great snap shot of the Pacific Health summit. It is vitally important that Dr. Chan addressed the elephant in the room (actually, the globe!) The fiefdoms must come to an end in order to serve the sick and the poor.
— Colleen Lyons on 2010-06-25
Thousands of women, all across the globe, die each year while giving birth. Reducing maternal and child mortality is the stated goal of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 4 & 5.
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— garima on 2010-06-30