This old saying can mean a number of things. It can mean, very simply, that health is important. But it can also mean that if you lose your health, you will have to spend whatever wealth you have to get it back. Given the price of medical care these days, that can certainly be true.

To poor people who have no wealth to spend at all, losing one’s health and losing one’s life are separated by a very thin line indeed. Sometimes the only thing standing between a sick poor person and death is a poorly equipped government hospital with a poorly supplied pharmacy. And there are nowhere near enough of even those for all the poor people in the country.

How does one bring essential health services within reach of the world’s poor? This was the question posed to a group of people who met at the British Medical Association in London last 13 March 2007. The Health Resource Centre of the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) gathered people from all over the world for the round-table discussion. Representatives of the Health Action International of Africa, the Harvard Medical School, the Open Democracy Advice Center, and Procurement Watch, Inc. were invited to present their on-going projects in this sector.

PWI Technical Officer Carole Belisario (in photos) described PWI’s efforts to combat corruption and inefficiency in the public procurement of health services and medicines. She made particular mention of the pilot-test of PWI’s DEEM tool to measure procurement efficiency at a major government hospital in the Philippines. Drawing on her wide knowledge of health issues (she is also the World Health Organization Consultant for the Good Governance for Medicines Project in the Asia-Pacific region), Ms Belisario impressed DFID enough to have the Philippines tagged as a pilot country for the proposed Medicines Transparency Alliance (MeTA) project. The goal of MeTA is to bring affordable, essential, quality medicines within reach of the poor.

MeTA is scheduled for launch sometime in June 2007.