Cheap and simple medical devices have to overcome deeply rooted biases

Nearly a decade ago, Burke, an emergency physician who heads the Division of Global Health Innovation at Massachusetts General Hospital, was in South Sudan, where he and a team of doctors had been tasked with setting up programs to improve maternal and newborn health. Few of the standard medical responses to PPH—uterotonic drugs, interventional radiology, even hysterectomies—were readily available in the fledgling, conflict-ravaged Republic of South Sudan, so Burke and his colleagues shifted their attention to uterine balloons, a simple mechanism that compresses against the source of the bleeding and helps activate the body’s own clotting response. The UBT is just one in a series of low-cost medical technologies that Burke and his colleagues hope to disseminate.These devices may not rise to the absolute gold standard of care but they are just good enough—particularly when lives hang in the balance.

Source: www.newyorker.com