On Monday, September 29, 2008, The CSIS Global Health Policy Center hosted a roundtable discussion with the first members of its newly formed Advisory Board, moderated by U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. J. Stephen Morrison, Director of the Global Health Policy Center, began by outlining future plans for the new initiative, “Our mandate boils down to striving to generate a long-term strategic U.S. vision for global health, and, secondly, taking systematic steps to enlarge the pool of new champions of global health drawn from foreign policy, international security, media and business leadership ranks.”
Ed Scott, a co-founder and chairman of the board of the Center for Global Development, gave some introductory remarks, “As we contemplate what [the Global Health Policy Center] ought to do and think about, I would say that what we ought to think about are the big fixes… …I think the structure of the global health system could use another look. You know we have, when you think about it, the WHO, The Global Fund, the bilaterals, PEPFAR, the NGOS, the faith-based organizations and the ministries of health all sort of engaged in some sort of amorphous way without any system for how they really work together and how they intersect or how they are financed… …What is some way that we could reconstitute this structure?”
The panel of advisors included:
Robert Mallett, President of the Pfizer Foundation Senior Vice President, Worldwide Alliance Development, Philanthropy, and Corporate Responsibility; Ed Scott, founder and CEO for the Center on Global Development; Jeffrey Sturchio, Vice President of Corporate Social Responsibility, Merck & Co. Inc.; Sally Canfield, Senior Program Officer for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; and Debrawork Zewdie, Director of the Global HIV/AIDS program at the World Bank.
The panel discussed the global health relationships between international and domestic policy, health and development, the role of family planning in global health, and the prospect for further global health initiatives in the business sector. Challenges in health financing, international coordination, increasing the sustainability of local community development, retention of domestic healthcare workers, and the willingness of policymakers to discuss family planning issues were also raised by the panel.
Bill Frist concluded the evening by establishing that “Our goal through CSIS is pretty clear… global health as we’ve heard today touches upon policy, touches clean water and traditional public health, it touches humanitarian efforts and charity, it touches investment and development.”
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