Walking home through east London a few evenings ago, I noticed a young woman begging by the side of the street. I was troubled by her desolate expression and stopped to talk.  She was eighteen, and had fled her family home five weeks previously to escape an imminent forced marriage.  She explained she had been unable to get into a hostel, and was begging for money to fund a night at the YWCA. I walked down the street and phoned Shelter to try and help her find accommodation, but returning with my page of scrawled information (of limited value), I found she had gone.  

My daily journey from home to university passes through one of the densest populations of rough sleepers in the country. Like many Londoners, my interaction with the people I see varies with whims of mood and circumstance. Sometimes I offer food or money, though the latter is an act fraught with uncertainty. I try to buy the Big Issue, and occasionally I’ll stop for a chat. More times than I care to remember, I follow the crowds hurrying past, eyes fixed on the middle distance. But I find it hard to do so without a lingering sense of unease and shame.

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I should declare my conflict of interest here before I pass over to Dan and Rupert for today’s blogspot. Pharmaware asked me to come and speak at their AGM and of course I did as they are a great organisation that helps students and doctors deal ethically with the pharmaceutical industry. Dan Beck, an active member of Pharmaware and a junior doctor working in Scarborough UK tells you more about it and Ruper Major, from the Leicester branch of Medsin tells us about all the fun packed things they have planned for this week. Over to you guys. Rhona

Are you Pharmaware? Two-thirds of doctors believe that their prescribing is not affected by drug reps. However two-thirds of doctors think their colleagues’ prescribing is affected. (1)

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 Here is another of Rafi’s report from the Women Deliver Conference. This time on the plenary session which focused on possible solutions. So over to Rafi—RhonaThe entertaining Hans Rosling and the amazing Gapminder

The Friday afternoon plenary of the Women Deliver conference was titled Shaping the Future - No More Business As Usual, and who better to shake things up than the charismatic editor-in-chief of The Lancet, Dr Richard Horton?  Other members of the panel included:

• Kavita Ramdas, President and CEO of the Global Fund for Women
• Dr. Dorothy Shaw, President of FIGO - the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics
• Laurie Garrett, Council on Foreign Relations, and a prize-winning author
• Andrew Francis, Member of Advocates for Youth’s International Youth Leadership Council (IYLC), and Coordinator of Jamaica Youth Advocacy Network on Sexual and Reproductive Health (JYAN-SRH)

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TheLancetStudent.com was delighted that Raphael (Rafi) Rogans-Watson, the Stop AIDS Campaign National Coordinator of Medsin was able to attend the Women Deliver conference on our behalf. Here is his report on a session which focused on sexual and reproductive health services and HIV/AIDS.  Rhona                                                            

Rafi Rogans-Watson

The first session that I attended on the second day of the Women Deliver Conference was run by some of the growing body of advocates and evidence-based projects that are calling for greater integration between Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) and HIV/AIDS responses.  Though many people in the field have been asking for this for some time, the research in this area (and the volume of the voices) is growing, and experts in both fields (who often have experience in both HIV and SRH) are starting to see the many benefits of working together.

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All sorts of people have turned up at the women deliver conference!

An exhausted Islean has made it to the last day of the conference. And it was a Saturday too. Here is her report on the final day -Rhona

Islean Kinghorn

I’m going to launch right in today, although I must apologise because I slept in a little this morning and so missed the first half of the morning Plenary. I may therefore, have missed some important points.

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 Morning Plenary Panel

Now we are on to Day 2 of Women Deliver and what a fabulous day it has been.  Islean, Rafi and I all went to different things (there is SO much going on). Here is a summary of Islean’s day. Over to you Islean—Rhona

Islean Kinghorn

It’s been another very long day. Mind, body and spirit are fatigued. Because of this I will start by telling you about a film that I actually saw towards the end of the day, simply because it was so moving and emotional that it will give me the momentum to keep writing.

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A star attraction at the conference

Hi there—Rhona here. The next few blog spots will be from the Women Deliver Conference in London. Sorry, they will be a bit out of synch. We (our TheLancetStudent.com correspondents, Islean Kinghorn and Rafi Rogans-Watson, and I) have been so busy running around that I have not been able to post the entries ’til a bit later. So this one is from Rafi from the afternoon of 18th October, the first day of the conference. —Rhona

Rafi Rogans-Watson

Working on Common Ground… But whose ground?

Today I was fortunate enough to attend the Women Deliver conference in London, a global meeting of 2000 delegates that aims to focus political will and financial resources on addressing the continuing burden of female ill health and mortality.  The conference marks the 20^th anniversary of the launch of the Safe Motherhood Initiative (in Nairobi, 1987), hailed during its time (and still today) as a landmark event that helped to move maternal health into the limelight. 

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Women Deliver issue of The Lancet—all content is free!

 It’s all go today. Now over to Islean Kinghorn to fill us about what went on at the first day of the Women Deliver Conference—Rhona

Twenty years ago, the Safe Motherhood Initiative, a global campaign to cut global maternal deaths by half, was launched was launched at a conference in Nairobi, Kenya. Although there have been improvements in middle-income countries, some countries, such as those in Sub Saharan Africa have made little to no improvement.

Meanwhile, the deadline for the millennium development goals (MDG’s), 2015, is looming.  MDG 5—reducing maternal mortality by 75%—is way off track. It is currently estimated that one woman dies each minute in childbirth, resulting in a loss of 10 million women in each generation. There are also massive disparities between the rich and poor. While 1 in 6 women in Afghanistan die during pregnancy, this figure is 1 in 25,000 in the US and 1 in 30,000 in Sweden.

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Have just arrived in Uganda to accompany the human rights charity HART on a trip to northern Uganda. This all started a year ago when HART’s chief exec’ Caroline Cox guided me off a train at Taunton, UK! 12 months on we are part of a small group of charity workers, health-workers and a human-rights lawyer heading to northern Uganda to aid a humanitarian aid effort after a decade of civil conflict between government militia  and the Lords resistance army; fortunately the combat has died down over the past few months. But the legacy is horrendous—tens of thousands of local people living in camps, chilldren orphaned by the death of their parents from the civil conflict, or from HIV/AIDS which although under reasonable control in some of Uganda remains a constant threat in the forgotten north. But that all lies ahead. Today has been a gentle introduction to ‘the pearl of Africa’ (as Winston Churchill called Uganda), a lush landscape in the capital Kampala, just a few miles north of the equator, nestling against Lake Victoria. Tomorrow the hard work starts when we fly north to Patongo district. More blogs to follow, and an upcoming feature in The Lancet’s  World Report section, not to mention audio highlights of the trip on thelancet.com. Richard Lane 

 Some Fogarty Scholars

Today is the first day of the Women Deliver Conference and our roving reporters have been there all day and will update us on all that has happened soon. But for now, I will leave today’s blog spot to Catherine (Katie) Pastorius who has just been to a presentation about the Fogarty International Scholars Program and is so enthused that she wants to tell you all about it. It sounds an incredibly useful program and the details of the people you need to contact if you are interested in finding out more are at the very bottom of this blog entry. So take it away, Katie. Rhona

Hey students! Are you from Bangladesh, Botswana, Brazil, China, Haiti, India, Kenya, Mali, Peru, South Africa, Tanzania, Thailand, United States (US), Uganda, or Zambia? The Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Washington D.C. is developing a community of scholars and is looking for motivated health students from these countries to get involved.

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