There are immense opportunities in this field and we really look forward to assisting reproductive and maternal health NGOs in making the most of these new tools in support of their work!

It’s proven very popular, with the current mentor Dr Dhammika Pererra responding to a wide variety of queries regarding challenges to referral systems.   August’s theme is ‘Pregnany Complications: Causes and Responses’, and the expert of the month is Dr. Grace Kodindo, who has received several awards for her championship of maternal health in crises settings and who is currently an assistant professor at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. The new revised app, with more functions, will be launched next week.

NFC is basically a set of short-range wireless technologies, typically requiring a distance of 10 cm or less, the technology always involves an initiator and a target and can take very simple form factors such as tags, stickers, key fobs, or cards that do not require batteries. NFC peer-to-peer communication is also possible, where both devices are powered.  NFC tags currently contain anything from simple data to elaborate instructions that enable them to unlock doors, pay for goods, launch phone calls or exchange data between users.  The below (4 year old) video from MIT gives a good idea of some of the possible uses.

NFC is already available on a number of phones and will be on all mobiles within a few years (kinda like the ‘new GPS’).  The technology opens up amazing new possibilities for health and development programmes/approaches, both from a professional and individual user perspective.  We want to map to these out and help the development/health community be at the forefront of this technology, as it rolls out!

The resolution has been one of the objectives of the safe hospitals campaign we designed for WHO. Another objective is to engage 100,000 people in this issue, we’re hence very pleased that 220,400 people have so far reacted for safe hospitals through the campaign’s Facebook ‘fast reaction’ application.   This is to our knowledge the most successful WHO awareness raising campaign to date.   Thank you also to our partner Taivas!!  A happy day.

+71,000 people have reacted to the challenge and new celebrity champions will be joining the campaign in a few weeks time. M4ID is also currently designing a map which will enable hospital administrators to list and the public to see what actions have been taken to make hospitals safe. For more about the issue and the reaction test go to the campaign site.