Southern Chhattisgarh Mobile Clinics
Cahier

Access to health products: which priorities and what role for MSF?

Michaël Neuman
Michaël
Neuman

Director of studies at Crash / Médecins sans Frontières, Michaël Neuman graduated in Contemporary History and International Relations (University Paris-I). He joined Médecins sans Frontières in 1999 and has worked both on the ground (Balkans, Sudan, Caucasus, West Africa) and in headquarters (New York, Paris as deputy director responsible for programmes). He has also carried out research on issues of immigration and geopolitics. He is co-editor of "Humanitarian negotiations Revealed, the MSF experience" (London: Hurst and Co, 2011). He is also the co-editor of "Saving lives and staying alive. Humanitarian Security in the Age of Risk Management" (London: Hurst and Co, 2016).

Natalie Roberts
Natalie
Roberts

Doctor, qualified in emergency medicine, surgery, and tropical medicine, with a Master's degree in the Political Economy of Violence, Conflict and Development (SOAS University of London) and a Master's degree in the History and Philosophy of Science (University of Cambridge), Natalie Roberts joined MSF in 2012. She completed field missions in Syria, Yemen, CAR, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Ukraine, and the Philippines before joining the Paris headquarters in 2016 as Emergency Programs Manager. Since joining Crash in late 2019, she has focused particularly on issues around epidemics, including Ebola, and access to medicines.

Date de publication

On 3rd and 4th February 2022, the CRASH organised a workshop aimed principally at the directors and operational managers of MSF Operational Centre Paris (OCP) to reflect on current debates, and to determine which elements of the discussion would be the most relevant to resolve in order to support the advancement of MSF OCP’s operational projects. Is access to medicines the same issue today as it was when MSF first became interested in the mid-1990s? Rather than just concentrating on the obstacles to accessing medicines, should the debate be broadened to encompass what are now called ‘health products’ or even further, towards access to care and thus largely structural problems of human resources, financing, or the absence of national health insurance policies?

We aimed to address these questions via four roundtables that each examined an important issue we want to tackle together, selected from current and future struggles felt to be priorities in our practice and our operational portfolio: vaccines for tuberculosis, malaria and beyond; the approach to tuberculosis and antibiotic resistance; the management of cancer patients; and issues in nutrition, malaria and paediatric health in general.

This "Cahier du CRASH" is a report on the workshop.

The Cahier can be downloaded in whole in PDF format. The two introductory chapters are available online, below.

To cite this content :
Michaël Neuman, Natalie Roberts, Access to health products: which priorities and what role for MSF?, 26 mai 2023, Collection : Cahiers du Crash, Pages : 94, URL : https://msf-crash.org/en/medicine-and-public-health/access-health-products-which-priorities-and-what-role-msf

If you want to criticize or develop this content, you can find us on twitter or directly on our site.

Contribute