Anyone who’s ever been admitted into a hospital room in Nairobi may harbour some misgivings. Even the most exclusive of rooms tend to be old fashioned and boring, with standard fittings and displays that hardly enhance care delivery. But all this is bound to change with demands to integrate modern technology into our sick beds. In 2050 and beyond, hospital rooms will be unrecognisable as we know them today. They will be the nicest ever, but hopefully most of us will never need to visit them.

This post should be required reading for every physician in this country. A physician finds a document on a chair in his hospital executive’s waiting room and reads through it, then realizes it is a manifesto on how to dis-empower physicians and put hospital administrators in control of patient care. The document’s title: How to Discourage A Doctor While the physician implies that he transcribed the information from memory, the formatting breaks and text errors in the document make it appear as if the document was scanned and then the text pasted.

The health of mothers has long been acknowledged to be a cornerstone of public health and attention to unacceptably high level of maternal mortality has been a feature of global health and development discussions since the 1980s. However, although a few countries have made remarkable progress in recent years, the reality has not generally followed the rhetoric.