Her Excellency Samia Suluhu Hassan, President of Tanzania and Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, Chair of the Qatar Foundation address the 2022 WISH Summit (Credit: Dalia Kanaan/WISH)

Ahmed J Versi, Doha, Qatar

Opening the World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH) summit in Doha, Qatar, Chair of the Qatar Foundation Sheikha Moza bint Nasser said they want to “rebuild healthcare systems accessible to all.”

Joining her was the President of Tanzania, Samia Suluhu Hassan, who acknowledged the role WISH was playing “to provide fairer, equitable access to health care.”

Under the theme, Healing the Future, Sheikha Moza said they had one overarching goal, “a search for solutions to enable all of us to live balanced, safe and healthy lives.”

Speaking on the forthcoming World Cup in Qatar, Sheikha Moza said: “Just as our sports projects, which after more than a quarter of a century have reached the level of hosting the FIFA World Cup, have inspired us to continue developing our country, they can inspire us again, in Qatar and around the world, to develop and reshape our perceptions of ways of building more efficient and comprehensive health care systems.”

The President said Tanzania was “keen to collaborate further to work towards developing fairer and equitable health systems for people through health innovations.”

Ahmed J. Versi, Editor of The Muslim News interviews Sultana Afdhal, CEO of the WISH Summit. (Credit: The Muslim News)

The Executive Chair of WISH, Professor Lord Darzi of Denham, stressed the significant role played by the body in overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic and its fallout through “sharing the ideas and experiences among the professionals in the health and pharmacy fields from various world countries.”

Lord Darzi said the pandemic “taught the world equality and equity in distributing vaccines to the citizens. And providing health care with different methods, hoping this joint ambition would show the world that cooperation and coordination” enable people “to counter challenges and build the future.”

Sultana Afdhal, CEO of WISH, told The Muslim News that in the ten years of its existence, WISH has helped to “shape policy within the country and how we continue to work after the summit to make a difference.”

Afdhal added that they published three World Cup reports. They focus on the journey of Qatar from three perspectives. “One is a healthy lifestyle. The other one was disability. And the third one was migrant worker welfare.”

She added that they wanted to “focus on key issues and see how we had moved the needle to improve things where challenges exist. So, that was new for this year.

The thing that we’ve increasingly started doing is carrying policy briefings. These are policy papers; they’re short reports, but they’re focused on Qatar, and what’s happening in Qatar in comparison to other parts of the world. So, I think that [our] evolvement of not only having a global voice but also looking at how we can affect policy in this country is key for us.”

One of the WISH summit sessions was on promoting health and wellbeing among the global migrant workforce. It was argued that the figure of 6,500 deaths in Qatar, published by the media in the West as World Cup-related deaths, was incorrect.

Sharan Burrow, General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, who was a panellist, described earlier that this figure was “a myth.”

The deaths were spread over ten years since the awarding of the World Cup hosting rights to Qatar, but not all were related to the tournament.

The CEO of WISH said the Ministry of Public Health had published data “that was empirical, that was verified by the ILO (International Labour Organisation), and this report is going to be published in the British Medical Journal.” Afdhal argued that “racism” was the primary reason behind negative reporting about Qatar since they won the bid for the World Cup.

“Honestly, I don’t like saying that, but for them, it’s difficult to understand why a country like Qatar would win the bid to hold a World Cup – it is just really not western enough for them. I don’t think there’s anything more than that.”

The WISH summit was held from October 4 to 6. It was attended by health professionals, policymakers, academics, and government officials from across the world. The topics discussed included pandemics, ethics of AI in healthcare, Islamic medical ethics, mental health, vaccine innovation, child health, the health of disabled people, and health among migrant workforces.

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