Incentives for Global Health have published a new report:”The Health Impact Fund: Making New Medicines Accessible for All”

The Health Impact Fund, our flagship proposal, is a new way of stimulating research and development of life-saving pharmaceuticals. To provide wide access, medicines need to be affordable-but low prices don’t create strong incentives for innovators to invest in research and development. The Health Impact Fund is an optional mechanism that offers pharmaceutical innovators a supplementary reward based on the health impact of their products, if they agree to sell those products at cost. The proposed Fund is to be financed mainly by governments.

I personally find this idea attractive. It shares a lot of characteristics and thinking with the Advance Market Commitment idea that I have worked on in the past. The main difference is that the AMC leaves patents in place; under the IGH they are signed away. If the pharmaceutical industry is willing to participate, this would be very attractive; my guess is that many firms will find this too challenging to their existing business model.

I’m impressed by the idea of the Welbodi Partnership, a charity supporting the Ministry of Health and Sanitation in Sierra Leone:

The Welbodi Partnership was established to support the provision of paediatric care in Sierra Leone, where child health statistics are the worst in the world.

The cool thing - as Tristan points out - is that:

they work directly with the Ministry of Health and Sanitation to improve the hospital, instead of running their own hospital, as many NGOs like to do. This way, they deliver services and build capacity in the country’s health system.

There are far too many NGOs who, for respectable reasons, set up parallel services. The result is duplication and waste, and foreign-funded NGOs often deplete capacity from already hard-pressed government systems. The Welbody partnership approach seems to combine the best of both worlds.

Does anyone know of other NGOs taking this approach?

The Disease Control Priorities Project has a striking feature article about fistula and maternal mortality

… across much of the less developed world, fistula is an ordinary hazard of childbirth for many women and a permanent blight on countless lives. In those countries, obstetric fistula overwhelming results from obstructed labor, which occurs when the baby cannot pass through the mother’s birth canal because it either does not come head first or is too large for her pelvis. In the developed world, prompt medical intervention, often including Caesarean section, permits a delivery safe for both mother and child. But thousands of times each year in poor countries, birthing women receive no such aid and their labor is a futile agony lasting up to five days, with uterine contractions constantly forcing the baby, usually head first, against unyielding pelvic bone.

Long before the mother’s torment ends, however, the unremitting pressure kills the child. It also cuts off the blood supply to the soft tissues of her vagina and other organs trapped between the baby’s skull and her pelvis. Eventually these tissues also die, forming one or more fistulas, and the baby’s head softens sufficiently for the stillborn child to pass from her body. Should she survive, the mother soon finds urine, feces or both leaking unstoppably from her vagina. In about a fifth of cases, the woman also suffers nerve injury that can cause a condition called footdrop, which prevents normal walking. Constant contact with urine or feces irritates and infects her skin and other tissues. Her kidneys, bladder, or other nearby organs may also be damaged. Her menstrual periods may stop, rendering her infertile.

The stark difference between the experience of mothers in the developing and developed worlds explains one of the greatest discrepancies known in health statistics, that between the rates of maternal mortality in rich and poor countries—a gap that constitutes “one of the most neglected issues of social injustice in the world today,” according to Wall and co-authors.17 Only 1 percent of the more than half a million maternal deaths each year happen in developed nations. In Northern Europe and North America, 11 women die for every 100,000 live births and a woman’s lifetime chance of dying because of pregnancy is 1 in 4,000. In Africa, that risk has been estimated at 1 in 14,18 and in some of the poorest parts of the continent, where over a thousand women die for every 100,000 live births, at 1 in 7.19

… A number of facilities, most prominently the renowned Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital, in Ethiopia, repair thousands of fistulas each year at a cost of about $450 for each operation and related care.²⁶ But still, the number of women suffering the disability and indignity continues to grow, creating a backlog that by some estimates would take centuries to clear, but which others believe could, with appropriate effort, be managed in a decade. And given the limited funds available for maternal care overall, experts differ on how to balance resources between prevention and treatment. In the opinion of Dr. Yifru Berhan, an obstetrician in the Ethiopian town of Hawassa, for example, “it’s unfortunate that we have hospitals to manage the complication but not to prevent the complication.”²⁷

(Declaration of interest: my partner works for Marie Stopes International, whose slogan is “Children by choice, not by chance”. Their work to provide women with access to sexual health services including contraception and abortion, enables women to choose when and whether they want to have children, enabling them to avoid pregnancy when they are very young, to avoid having too many children and to increase the spacing between children, all of which are important ways to prevent this kind of complication from pregnancy and childbirth.)

Michael Clemens at the Center for Global Development is one of the smartest (and nicest) people who think seriously about development. What I particularly like is his willingness to challenge conventional wisdom - and to back his judgements with well-researched evidence. When he had doubts about the common view that it was a bad idea for industrialized countries to “poach” health workers from developing countries, he didn’t just put a theoretical argument - he went to Africa to gather data and interview health workers there to understand their stories. His blog post today If Congress Admits More Foreign Nurses, Will It Be Responsible for Killing Children in Poor Countries? Think Again is a good example of the clarity of his thought:

Africa needs stronger health systems, to be sure, but can we build those systems with our immigration policy? There is no scientific evidence that this has happened anywhere, or is possible anywhere. We should be very hesitant to force real people with real families to accept wages that we would never accept, without overwhelming and indisputable proof that by itself this blunt act does enormous good.