Transcript of the Prime Minister’s speech in New York.
Read the transcript:
Prime Minster:
Can I first of all say what a privilege it is to be at this conference, chaired by Prime Minister Stoltenberg. He has been a constant champion, an inspired leader, and he is a driving force for change. And as you heard today, Norway has done so much and must be congratulated by the rest of the world, not only for maintaining but for extending its commitment in health, education and in international development generally.
It is a pleasure to be with Bill Gates who has pioneered work that has saved thousands, and indeed hundreds of thousands of lives, and your work on polio, tuberculosis, now on malaria and the other work that you do as head of the Gates Foundation, with Melinda, the whole world is in your debt. And Margaret Chan is here today and she is an inspired leader of the World Health Organisation.
Despite the progress that has been made, that Jens has drawn attention to, despite all the commitments made in the past, despite the goodwill and the good work of millions, we know that the Health Service Millennium Development Goals are off track and that we have a great deal to do.
While funding for global health has more than doubled since 2000, saving millions of lives, global maternal mortality – as Jens has just said – these rates have stayed largely unchanged for the last 20 years. And what should be the happiest time of a life when a new baby is born, turns out for half a million mothers a year to be the saddest as they face death as a result of the inadequate treatment that is available for them.
And while progress has been made on important, and indeed with certain targeted interventions, we now know that ensuring sustainable long term health provision will take more than funding for vaccines or treatments alone.
So our next challenge, and the greatest of tragedies demands the greatest of endeavour, must be to help developing countries to improve their own health systems, to make sure they are able to recruit and train more than 4 million health workers whose skills will be desperately needed across the world. The Global Campaign for Health knows that it will take around $30 billion by 2015, but that that would save the lives of 3 million more mothers, and 7 million more children.
To make healthcare more effective we launched the international health partnership last year, with a number of countries to support the development and funding of national health plans. I can say that over the next three years the United Kingdom will make available an estimated £450 million to back health plans for 8 countries: Ethiopia, Mozambique, Kenya, Zambia, Burundi, Nigeria, Cambodia and Nepal. And we call on other countries to work with us to make it possible to extend these programmes to other countries as well.
There is another issue. Experience in Ethiopia has shown that this approach is one that gets results. Nearly 25,000 community health workers are now trained and delivering family planning, immunisation and health education to these communities, and fully announced this programme could increase the number of skilled workers in attendance in Mozambique by two-thirds by 2015.
Now traditional sources of funding through aid could make a massive contribution, but to deliver long term investment in health systems and health workers, I believe we will need a new and long term approach, and this – the greatest of causes – I think now needs the greatest of endeavour by us.
The success of the international finance mechanism for immunisation means that over 10 years it will immunise as many as half a billion people and save up to 10 million lives. I believe that the same principles may be applicable to general healthcare and building the capacity of healthcare systems. And we are today, with other countries, announcing a new high level task force on innovative financing for health, to see what we can do to ensure that the funding is available as soon as possible to employ the health workers that are needed.
Bob Zoellick, who has now arrived - and I am grateful to him for his sterling work as President of the World Bank - and I, are going to jointly chair this high level task force. Several of its members, I am pleased to say, are with us today. It will report to the G8 Summit in July next year, by the agreement of the Italian Prime Minister, Mr Berlusconi. The new task force will develop recommendations on the innovative finance mechanisms that are needed to strengthen healthcare systems and pay for healthcare workers. These plans will help, if we are good enough in our recommendations, to save 10 million lives by 2015, to help over half a million new health workers, and indeed fund them, and ensure that over 400 million women across the world are able to give birth safely and we can free them from the shadows of fear.
Mr Kouchner, the Foreign Minister of France, Graca Machel, the President of Liberia, Margaret Chan herself, and Mr Tremonti, the Finance Minister of Italy, the Development Minister of Germany and Jens Stoltenberg himself have agreed to be part of what I believe will be a major effort moving forward plans for financing healthcare in a new and better way for the future.
And I would now like to hand over to another member of the high level task force, and someone who as the Director of the World Health Organisation has achieved an enormous amount and of whom I am very proud. She knows more than most about the challenges ahead – Margaret Chan.
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