Growing innovations: MSF’s sapling nursery

Working in areas where chemical weapons are a threat is stressful for medical teams. Personal decontamination kits can offer some protection in the event of exposure, but they are bulky and difficult to store in cramped conditions. This proposal, from an MSF logistician recently on assignment in Iraq, uses lean design principles to reduce waste and maximize value. He aims to develop a discrete, efficient, and foolproof decontamination kit to help keep staff safe and ensure they can focus their attention on what matters most: delivering the best care to patients.

Telemedicine—treating patients and providing expert medical advice remotely through telecommunications technology—is an increasingly important tool for MSF’s medical teams. But taking photographs of slides through a microscope, often necessary for remote diagnosis, has historically involved the use of an expensive mounted camera and proprietary software, prohibitive requirements in many of the contexts where MSF works. This proposal aims to solve that problem through the development of a low cost ($10–$80) adapter that would allow MSF medical staff members to use their smartphones to capture microscope images.

Treating child malnutrition is a major part of many MSF projects, but screening babies, especially under six months of age, can be difficult. The most common approach involves using cumbersome “measuring boards” to check a baby’s growth and then recording malnutrition levels on complicated paper forms. The process is so onerous and error-prone that malnutrition screening for children this young is not standard at many MSF projects. To address this gap, an MSF epidemiologist in India has proposed a kit with simplified tools including a digital device to measure a baby's length and a Z-score calculator, an app developed by the World Health Organization to calculate nutrition based on weight and height readings. These tools will be evaluated in MSF projects to determine whether their use could help ensure that more young children are screened—and therefore treated—for malnutrition.