While appreciating that primary health care has an important role, our rationale to focus on medical emergencies and hospital care is based on the largely unmet need of dealing with life-threatening emergencies and their complications in maternal, neonatal, and child health in resource-limited settings: for example, 80% of maternal deaths are caused by emergency conditions that could potentially be treated with appropriate and high quality emergency health care.

 

Central to our work is our belief that every human life has equal value and all of our activities are underpinned by a rights-based approach. We believe in supporting public health systems and advocate for effective treatment to be free at the point of delivery and accessible to all pregnant women, babies, and children, whatever their situation. We work in partnership with the Ministries of Health and the UN agencies in the countries in which we work, to ensure that our work best serves the health needs of the population and crucially, so that our projects are sustainable and acceptable to communities.

 

Whilst our work has been, and continues to be, varied, common to all our projects is our reliance on international expert volunteer doctors, nurses, and midwives: employing local experienced staff in the countries in which we work: and working in partnership with international and national organisations.

 

We are also committed to monitoring and evaluating our work so that we can be sure that all of our projects are effective, and ensuring that where possible, robust systems and plans are in place before we hand a project over to national partners.