Speaker Session: Innovations in health

The Innovations in Health speaker session was held on day two of the conference, featuring presentations from Professor Mike English and Dr Chris Paton.

• ‘Doing research together with stakeholders to design a human resource innovation’
  Professor Mike English
  Associate Fellow of Green Templeton; Professor of International Child Health, Centre for Tropical Medicine & Global Health, University of Oxford; Senior Research Fellow of KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Nairobi
• ‘LIFE Project: Making healthcare training possible without boundaries’
  Dr Chris Paton
  Group Head, Global Health Informatics, University of Oxford

Panel report

By Josephine Agyeman-Duah, Finance Manager, Human Welfare Conference 2019

The ‘Innovation in Healthcare’ session resonated well with my personal experience of working in different health systems across varied settings of constraints and relative abundance. It was quite interesting to learn from Dr. Chris Paton when he described the Life Saving Instructions for Emergencies (LIFE) project as a classical example of how advanced technology could bridge healthcare barriers. LIFE uses 3D game engine technology and capitalizes on the use of mobile phones, which is wide spreading even in resource-limited settings, to advance healthcare training without borders. I was impressed to know that Chris and his team’s innovation has a well laid out learning and redesign module which makes their app always evolving to meet demands. Life is not a game, but LIFE saves lives out of a GAME!

On the flip side, in the age of AI and many other fancy advances in technology and innovations, one may be tempted to overlook the basics which most often are the solutions to the myriad of challenges health systems face. In his session, Professor Mike English described how useful it is to involve stakeholders to redesign a seemingly failing health system to make it responsive to neonatal care, as an example. Mike summarizes his experience as, stakeholders are essential in designing health system innovations, however, do note that it takes considerable amount of time to involve stakeholders, therefore, be ready to listen to them if you engage stakeholders and be adaptable. He further added that ‘community-based interventions are important but we need functional health systems to save lives in emergencies.’

I couldn’t have agreed enough with Mike on this part of his take home message to ‘think long term and do not just focus on solving the current (healthcare) challenges’.

Pictures from the session