‘It’s Always Personal’

Whenever Priya Agrawal went to sleep, she thought of the women whose lives she had not been able to save during her work in India and Africa. “You close your eyes and they are on the inside of your eyelids,” she recalls. “Every single time I wasn’t able to get the blood in time for the woman dying in childbirth, there had been five, ten opportunities to prevent her even getting to that stage.”Dr Agrawal is Executive Director ofMSD for Mothers*, which is the pharma manufacturer ’s $500 million, ten-year commitment to ending preventable maternal mortality.  Maternal mortality unacceptably highEvery day, approximately 830 women die from pregnancy or childbirth-related complications. “Two Jumbo jets of women dying per day is just not acceptable,” Agrawal says simply. An obstetrician and gynecologist by training, her CV in global women ' s health could hardly be more impressive: after training at the universities of both Oxford and Cambridge, she went to the Harvard School of Public Health on a Fulbright Scholarship. Since then, she has worked in countries such as India, Kenya and Nigeria for bodies ranging from the World Health Organization (WHO) to social enterprises before choosing to help MSD.MSD for Mothers seeks to identify and develop solutions to tackle some of the most critical obstacles that stand in the way of delivering quality care that could reduce the number of women who die during childbirth. Agrawal understands better than most that prevention is ...
Source: EyeForPharma - Category: Pharmaceuticals Authors: Source Type: news