May 2016

[2]Photo credit: Warren Zelman

Envision a world where every mother, every newborn, and every child has the opportunity for a healthy life.

Delivering Life-Saving HIV/AIDS Drugs Around the World [6]

HIV & AIDS [8]

[6]SCMS supported local partners in 25 countries to build country ownership of supply chain management. Read more about SCMS’s impact in its report: 10 Years of Supporting PEPFAR through Stronger Public Health Supply Chains [9]

By Sherif Mowafy

[Chantal, an HIV-positive woman, waits for her monthly supply of antiretroviral medication at the Hôpital Immaculée Conception in Haiti.] {Photo credit: Jean Jacques Augustin, SCMS} Chantal, an HIV-positive woman, waits for her monthly supply of antiretroviral medication at the Hôpital Immaculée Conception in Haiti.Photo credit: Jean Jacques Augustin, SCMSAs the warm Haitian sun comes up, Chantal leaves her four children behind to get her HIV treatment, traveling for three hours in the back of a crowded jeep.

She bumps over unpaved roads to her monthly visit for antiretrovirals, one that she has been doing routinely for several years to keep her disease at bay.

Her children don’t know that she is HIV positive, and she doesn’t want to tell them. She makes this long trip over rough and ragged terrain to preserve her privacy and escape the possibility of stigma, still prevalent in Haitian society.

Preventing Epidemics: The Next Agenda for Women's Health and Rights [11]

Jonathan D. Quick, MD, MPH [12]

HIV & AIDS [8]

Associated Press/Aurelie Marrier d’Unienvil}

[11]Women celebrate as their country is declared Ebola free in the city of Freetown, Sierra Leone, Saturday, Nov. 7, 2015.Photo credit: Associated Press/Aurelie Marrier d’Unienvil

When 18-year-old Ianka Barbosa was 7 months pregnant, an ultrasound showed the baby had an abnormally small head, a dreaded sign of microcephaly due to Zika infection. Upon hearing the news, Ianka’s husband fled. In her poor neighborhood of Campina Grande, Brazil, Ianka soon became a young mother alone.

As Ianka’s baby Sophia grows, she may never walk, or talk. She could develop seizures before she reaches six months. By the end of the year there may be a staggering 3,000 Sophias in Brazil – mostly in the poorest places.

Epidemics erase the gains women have achieved.

The world has suffered a series of “Zikas”—virtually unknown diseases that seemed to come from nowhere and explode with devastating consequences for families and entire countries – before Zika, Ebola, SARS, AIDS, and others.

Epidemics don’t just leave behind a death toll. They can demolish the gains women have made in maternal, newborn, child, adolescent, and reproductive health—gains that have been propelled by women’s rights and empowerment.

Health Systems Strengthening for the SDGs, Epidemics Prevention, and Global Health Security: MSH at the 69th World Health Assembly [16]

Management Sciences for Health [17]

Chronic Diseases [18]

[16]Photo credit: Rui Pires

Are you interested in health systems strengthening for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), epidemics prevention, and global health security? Join MSH at these events during the 69th World Health Assembly in Geneva. Can't join us in person? Join the conversation online with hashtag #WHA69 [19]. On Twitter, follow @MSHHealthImpact [20], @MSHACTS [21], @NoMoreEpidemics [22], and @JonoQuick [23].

Motivating Better Health: Why Other Types of Programs So Often Fail—and Results-based Financing Succeeds [25]

[25]Photo credit: Warren Zelman

There are no magic bullets in life. For fixing a healthcare system, though, there is one approach that comes close: results-based financing. Management Sciences for Health (MSH) pioneered results-based financing in Haiti in 1999, and has been adapting and improving it ever since in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and South-East Asia, including in fragile states.

In my 20-plus years in global health, I’ve seen what happens without results-based financing: A major donor sends millions of dollars’ worth of equipment and supplies to a developing country—and the quality of health services delivered doesn’t improve—or worse, it declines. Why?

Health providers are human, like all of us—sensitive to incentives, motivation, and demotivation. Say a hospital improves and now is well stocked: the community realizes this and the utilization rate doubles. Suddenly, a nurse may be facing 40 patients a day instead of 20, but without any added pay or assistance. It’s only natural he or she might work less under the crushing workload.

G7, We Can Prevent Pandemics [27]

Jonathan D. Quick, MD, MPH [12]

This post appears in its entirety on HuffPost Impact. [28]

[27]Photo credit: Warren Zelman

Pandemics are back on the agenda [29] for the 2016 G7 Summit, which convenes this week in Ise-Shima, Japan. The Group of Seven is expected to further its commitments to global health security.

Look what has happened in less than one year since the G7 last met (June 2015), just after the Ebola crisis peaked at over 26,300 cases, 10,900 deaths.

Financing Health for All: Global Health Impact [31]

Management Sciences for Health [17]

Chronic Diseases [18]

HIV & AIDS [8]