The USAID Strengthening Health Outcomes through Private Sector (SHOPS) and mHealth Alliance is currently showcasing a Pre-Conference Hall of their inaugural annual e-Conference that seeks to advance private sector innovations in the sustainable provision and use of quality family planning/ reproductive health products and services.

Registration is still open for the May 5 event. [...]]]>

The USAID Strengthening Health Outcomes through Private Sector (SHOPS) and mHealth Alliance is currently showcasing a Pre-Conference Hall of their inaugural annual e-Conference that seeks to advance private sector innovations in the sustainable provision and use of quality family planning/ reproductive health products and services.

Registration is still open for the May 5 event. Highlights will include panel presentations from Grameen Foundation, Pesinet, Catholic Relief Services, Millennium Villages Project, and other mHealth implementers throughout Africa and Asia. Be sure to check out the chat sessions and the resource center.

Register to learn more about how you can collect and share more timely and accurate field health information, reach your target beneficiaries with personalized text messages and help health workers improve treatment quality at the point of care. Participation requires only internet connectivity.

More information about the eConference

You can also visit the Global Health Ideas blog for a text version of the original announcement

– Inspiring a New Generation Developing Global Citizens of [...]]]> USAID and several USG departments are taking the global pulse through a 3 day series of e-conversations on issues related to global development. Topics range from citizenship in the 21st century to empowering women to promoting global health and investing in science and technology and others listed here.

– Inspiring a New Generation Developing Global Citizens of the 21st Century
– Empowering Women and Girls Making equality a reality
– Enabling the Essential Education What everyone should learn to succeed in the 21st century
– Building Stronger Partnerships Explore new ways to promote partnerships between societies, citizens, community organizations, and businesses as a means of creating sustainable solutions to shared development priorities
– Exercising Political and Civil Rights Understanding rights, increasing citizens participation and expanding accountability
– Promoting Global Health Connecting and empowering individuals and communities to take charge over their own health and well-being
– Advancing Entrepreneurship, Trade & Economic Opportunity Find new ways to advance entrepreneurship, job creation, and economic opportunity
– Fostering Science, Technology & Innovation Discover new ways to support societies and build capacity by leveraging science and technology
– Supporting a Sustainable Planet Exchange lessons learned on how to address global climate change
– Pursuing Grand Challenges Identifying the “grand challenges” of the next decade

Check it out and register at GlobalPulse2010.gov

Reflections on the Conference

We [heart] Margaret Chan

Coming full circle with Arvind

From grassroots to policy

“Small is beautiful [...]]]> Jaspal did a fantastic job summarizing the GHC in six posts.  They’re available on THDblog and Design Research Mongolia.  If you’re looking for a top pick, start with #5 “We [heart] Margaret Chan“.  I list them here in reverse temporal order.

Reflections on the Conference

We [heart] Margaret Chan

Coming full circle with Arvind

From grassroots to policy

“Small is beautiful but big is necessary”

Social marketing

Richard Smith at the BMJ Blog wrote about last week’s Private Sector Health Systems conference [program PDF] in Wilton Park. The full text is at the BMJ, but here’s my summary. In many developing countries, the poor are much more likely to use private providers than public sector, [...]]]> I posted this one to THDblog as well.

Richard Smith at the BMJ Blog wrote about last week’s Private Sector Health Systems conference [program PDF] in Wilton Park. The full text is at the BMJ, but here’s my summary. In many developing countries, the poor are much more likely to use private providers than public sector, if they use healthcare at all.

People in Bangladesh get 80% of their healthcare from the private sector. Across Sub-Saharan Africa it’s 60%, and the proportion is increasing. The poorer people are the more likely they are to receive private care, and the middle classes consume more publicly funded care than the poor…Much of the private care that the poor receive in developing countries is, of course, of low quality. It is often provided by unqualified practitioners and is undermined by corruption, but there are – a McKinsey study in Africa showed – “islands of excellence.”

As Smith points out, the private healthcare sector in many low-income countries isn’t the only sector with highly inconsistent healthcare quality.

government provided health care is also commonly poor, throughout Africa public health systems are derelict, and governments cannot fund, provide, and regulate care.

Smith’s intended audience of high-income country donors and policymakers may be reluctant to engage with private sector actors. Some caution is understandable but the need for practical solutions to dramatically improve healthcare provision leads to private sector mechanisms (for a good review of competitive contracting, performance-based finance and similar tools check out “Getting Health Reform Right” by Roberts, Hsiao, Berman, and Reich). The interesting thread I don’t hear as often, but have run across in my own work, is the challenge that low-income governments will have regulating the purchase of private sector healthcare. Smith’s post didn’t address it but the comments that followed did. The first response from Nigeria Health Watch blogger Chikwe Ihekweazu got to the point.

The major problem in many African countries in addition to the resistance of the concept is ‘management’ and ‘strategic thinking’ in the health sector. In Nigeria, where I am from, there is a proliferation of private health care facilities at all levels with no regulation, no accountability and no governance. …the private sector has a huge role to play…but only if there is the strategic leadership by governments to drive and regulate this.

As has been pointed out in the literature, private healthcare deals in volume in many low-income countries, but for these schemes to succeed governments need to lead and donors ought to be willing to invest in effective public management.