Millions Saved: New Cases of Proven Success in Global Health

Imperial welcomes the Centre for Global Development as they launch a new book by Amanda Glassman.

Staff from Imperial welcomed Amanda Glassman and colleagues from the Centre for Global Development on Monday 9th May to celebrate the launch of the new volume of the Centre’s acclaimed book, 'Millions Saved: New Cases of Proven Success in Global Health'.

‘Millions Saved’ chronicles the global health revolution that is taking place from the ground up and showcases 22 of the local, national and regional health programmes, policies and frugal innovations that have helped transform this global change. Furthermore, during the event, Amanda described the incredible past decade of Global Health interventions which have seen peoples’ health improve drastically across low and middle income countries.  She emphasized that over the last 15 years, the annual rate of newly infected people with HIV has dropped from around three million to two million and deaths from malaria have halved.  Importantly, we’ve also seen child mortality cut in half since 1990 which has happened much faster than the rate called for by the Millennium Development Goals. 

During her talk, Amanda gave examples of some of the successful programmes featured in the book including a vaccine against meningitis in Africa and Thailand’s campaign for tobacco control. However, the book not only looks at these success stories but also aims to learn from programmes which didn't quite meet their health goals once scaled up.  This learning is crucial  in order to better understand what works and what does not. D

Director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation (IGHI), Professor the Lord Ara Darzi of Denham, who spoke at the event, outlined the great synergies between the important goals of the Centre for Global Development and the remit of the Institute of Global Health Innovation, which today is leading work to understand the crucial next step in this pipeline of healthcare reform, the diffusion of innovation.

In his closing remarks, Lord Darzi said, "Now more than ever, we are aware that so many impressive, lean and frugal innovative care models are arising from low-income countries, and that these could and should be translated not just to resource depleted settings but even high-income countries where there is increasingly tight resource-constraints.

Amanda and her colleagues should be proud to play such an important part in capturing the learning and examples that will help inform and educate the next 10 years of this global health revolution". 

Find out more about the book by visiting the website.