&l;em&g;In between kidney and liver transplants, I sat down with Jaymie Ang Henry&a;ndash; gifted surgeon, founder of the G4 Alliance, founding member of Forbes Impact, and an investor in the Vatican&a;rsquo;s Laudato Si Challenge &a;ndash; who&a;rsquo;s on a mission to make sure at least 80% of the world has access to essential medical services by 2030. &l;/em&g;
&l;em&g;She&a;rsquo;s shaking up the global public health scene from the Masai Mara in Kenya to the halls of United Nations, and I&a;rsquo;m grateful to call her a close friend. &l;/em&g;
&l;em&g;As part of Forbes Impact x Miami, we sat down together in her Wynwood loft to talk about growing up in the Philippines, her gift in combining real impact&a;nbsp;with real investment, her partnership and marriage&a;nbsp;to an accomplished tech entrepreneur, and what she thinks about Pope Francis.&l;/em&g;
&l;img class=&q;size-large wp-image-86&q; src=&q;http://blogs-images.forbes.com/bdoherty/files/2018/08/Forbes_OR-1200x902.jpg?width=960&q; alt=&q;&q; data-height=&q;902&q; data-width=&q;1200&q;&g; Jaymie Ang Henry, surgeon and impact investor
&l;strong&g;Brendan&l;/strong&g;&a;nbsp;&l;strong&g;Doherty:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g;First off, I&s;m just so grateful that you walked into my life. You&s;re such an inspiring human&l;strong&g;&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g;and manage to balance so much at once. And all for what I would consider really impactful things in the world. And it would be wonderful if you could just start telling me, what was it about your own childhood that made you into this person who today fights for so many incredible causes?
&l;strong&g;Jaymie Ang Henry:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g; I always start by saying, growing up in the Philippines taught me a lot. Even at a young age, I looked around and saw that there&s;s a lot of inequalities that didn&s;t sit well with me. I kind of grew up grappling with those issues. Why are people living on the streets? Why are children not given the opportunity to have an education? And I joined a lot of missions &a;mdash; even from grade school, high school, in medicine &a;mdash; meaning I would join NGOs and go to the urban areas. We&s;d call them the &q;urban poor&q; and we would go and distribute food, or even money sometimes. All throughout medical school, we go give free medicine and then free surgery. I noticed that every time we would get there, the people were waiting for us with their hands open. We&a;rsquo;d go every year but nothing&s;s changed. I noticed there&s;s a dance, or a practice. People wait for us to be there to give them help and we had a role in giving them that. And they had a kind of role in being the needy person. I just felt that there was something wrong with that and started asking the question, &a;ldquo;Are we really helping them or are we actually creating these legacies of dependence? What is real impact? Is it really giving money or food away? Or is it trying to look into the deeper issues that are causing poverty, causing a lack of education, or causing lack of access to health, and maybe putting our efforts into those areas that will actually make it better?&a;rdquo;
&l;strong&g;Doherty:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g;Do you remember a moment when that realization struck you? Or was it cumulative?
&l;strong&g;Ang Henry:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g;I&s;m going to share a very personal story &a;ndash; my grandmother is Chinese, she moved to the Philippines from China. She was working with a boy, as household help. He helped her around the house and carried stuff for her when she would go to the market. She was good to him. She&s;d give him food, provide shelter, and give him all the necessary things that he needed. And one day, there was another guy who came in from another province, and he influenced the boy. We didn&s;t know. We were suspicious and my uncle said, &q;Sorry but we&s;re not going to hire you,&q; because we didn&s;t feel comfortable with him. But my uncle was kind to him and said, &q;You know what, why don&s;t you stay here one night? The following day, we will give you some money, so that you can go back to your province.&q; It took only one night for that guy to influence the boy to steal from my grandmother. Then, they actually snuck up on my grandmother and killed her. In one instance, all the kindness and charity that my grandmother provided him wasn&s;t enough. When it was about survival, when it was about getting money, somebody could influence that person very quickly. I had a realization, but I didn&s;t blame that other guy. In a way I blamed society and its failings. Its failure to educate this young boy. This boy probably never experienced human dignity. He probably didn&s;t understand gratitude,&a;nbsp;even if he was being shown kindness.
That fueled a lot of my thoughts about impact, aid, charity and help. A lot of the things that we&s;ve created and we&s;re born into in this society were choices that were made by people who came before us. I thought that if we ever hope to be able to change things for real &a;mdash;and not just a stopgap solutions &a;mdash; we need to go to the root of it and look at power structures, corruption, lack of education, lack of access.
&l;img class=&q;size-full wp-image-87&q; src=&q;http://blogs-images.forbes.com/bdoherty/files/2018/08/Forbes_field.jpg?width=960&q; alt=&q;&q; data-height=&q;720&q; data-width=&q;960&q;&g; Ang Henry in the Phillipines and reunited with Yuan, a boy who was born with an imperforate anus but now lives healthy after his surgery.
&l;strong&g;Doherty:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g;Let me pause you and ask, if you saw up close these major institutional pieces and systems at work, what led you to become a surgeon? In some ways being a doctor is the most microcosmic you can be &a;ndash; affecting an individual life.
&l;strong&g;Ang Henry:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g;I was heavily influenced by a man named &l;a href=&q;https://www.forbes.com/video/4274467825001/&q;&g;Paul Farmer&l;/a&g;, he&s;s a public health expert and pretty well known in the field. I went to a conference where he was speaking to a group of surgeons. He said, the one best thing that you can offer a country is your skill, being a surgeon. There&s;s so many amazing, really good public health experts all over the world but what I realized then, is there&s;s a lack of access to basic surgical care in the world. So you need to be a surgeon to understand the root causes of why there&s;s a lack of translation of this technology. Is it more the actual skill, or is it the infrastructure around it? Is it a policy problem, is it a systems problem? I needed to hack into that problem from the inside. That way, I could really immerse my brain into the solution. I have now married two worlds, the world of public health &a;mdash; being that patient on the ground who is suffering from lack of access &a;ndash; to studying at the best places where they provide surgery, and seeing how I can bridge the gap between the two.
&l;strong&g;Doherty:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g;Have you ever heard of the Japanese &l;a href=&q;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemba&q; target=&q;_blank&q;&g;concept called &l;em&g;genba&l;/em&g;&l;/a&g;?
&l;strong&g;Ang Henry:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g;No.
&l;strong&g;Doherty:&l;/strong&g; When Henry Ford started the modern assembly line and revolutionized industrial production, the Japanese took it one step further. Not right away. The concept of &l;em&g;genba&l;/em&g; translates as &q;go to the source&q; or the root, which is like what you&s;re saying. The idea is that for even a CEO, you have got to get out of the C-suite and actually go down to the factory floor and see what&s;s happening at every step in that process. And the other piece of it, which I found so interesting, was it also was about empowering every single person on that assembly line to kill the line if they saw something that wasn&s;t right. Essentially, everyone was in charge of quality assurance, as opposed to a quality assurance department, and everyone had the power to stop production based on that responsibility. And that&a;rsquo;s what leapt ahead the automakers of Japan, decades after the Model T.
How are you helping make some of our world&s;s most basic but necessary surgeries more accessible?
&l;img class=&q;size-large wp-image-88&q; src=&q;http://blogs-images.forbes.com/bdoherty/files/2018/08/Forbes_WHO-1200x900.jpg?width=960&q; alt=&q;&q; data-height=&q;900&q; data-width=&q;1200&q;&g; World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland, with some members of the Global Alliance for Surgery, Obstetrics, Trauma, and Anesthesia Care (G4 Alliance) after the successful on-the-ground advocacy and passage of the landmark WHO resolution on Essential Surgery, breaking 70 years of silence.
&l;strong&g;Ang Henry:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g;There&s;s about 5 billion people with &l;a href=&q;http://www.theg4alliance.org/our-work/2016/1/22/inequalityis-5-billion-people-living-without-access-to-life-saving-surgical-care&q; target=&q;_blank&q;&g;no access to basic essential surgical care&l;/a&g;. It&s;s been five years of me digging into why that is happening. I went to the World Health Organization (WHO) and there&a;rsquo;s one office that does surgery, the rest of the WHO really didn&s;t know anything about this problem. There was this lack of access to surgery. So, the first thing that I felt was really missing was the advocacy. There is a constituency, a huge body of NGOs, other advocates, people who have been quietly doing their thing to improve surgical services. But there was no one who actually brought them all together at one table, and elevated the conversation at the global level. So that&s;s what I did. I spent five years really getting to know every single major player in the field. I talked to them, I understood where they were coming from, and they found a middle ground where I basically said, &q;We need to work together, because this not a one person effort. And when we pooled our voices, that&s;s when the world started to notice. That&s;s where things started shifting.
&l;strong&g;Doherty:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g;So where are we now, what&s;s been the result? And what&a;rsquo;s the future ambition?
&l;strong&g;Henry:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g;We created &l;a href=&q;http://www.theg4alliance.org/&q; target=&q;_blank&q;&g;the G4 Alliance&l;/a&g;, which is the global alliance for surgical, obstetric trauma, and anesthesia care. It&s;s basically an 85 member-strong organization where we&s;ve united our voices to work with the WHO, the United Nations, the World Bank. From the policy standpoint, that&s;s moving forward. We&s;ve gotten 192 UN member countries to actually sign on to a resolution saying we want to strengthen emergency and essential surgical care.
But the problem is that the policies are there, the signatures are there, but what about the funding? We haven&s;t had a major body that would commit in a serious way to making this happen. We all know that it&s;s all just talk unless somebody puts their foot forward and commits in a real way, with money, with resources, with a plan, with a global goal, with a target, and with all the steps necessary to get us there from right now until five or ten years later. We don&s;t have that yet. That&s;s what we&s;re trying to jumpstart, a plan to get us to a point where 80 percent of the world will have access to emergency and essential surgical care by 2030.
&l;strong&g;Doherty:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g;What would be examples of that kind of care?
&l;strong&g;Ang Henry&l;/strong&g;: At the very basic level, we want cleft lip and palate, congenital cataracts or cataracts, emergency obstetric care, essential trauma care. Those are the four major things that are the Tier 1, most important procedures that should be available to anyone, regardless of their ability to pay. And then, there&s;s the tier 2. We&s;ve actually put together 15 categories of basic and essential surgical care that we feel should be available to anybody regardless of their ability to pay.
&l;strong&g;Doherty:&l;/strong&g; Do you see a business or investment model around this that could help accelerate this transition, or is it more charitable contributions and grants?
&l;strong&g;Ang Henry:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g;Absolutely. There are institutions that actually have what you&s;d call a public/private partnership with the government and a local NGO that&s;s running a really well-functioning hospital. They provide good quality care, obviously, and a portion of the hospital is open to private paying citizens. The money that they earn from there goes to fund the charitable patients. It&a;rsquo;s a for-profit venture that has a not-for-profit initiative that goes with it.
Another model is a hospital in India focused on heart and cataract surgery. They have a high-volume, high-quality service. They&a;rsquo;re able to be really efficient in the service so that they can provide it for a fraction of the cost.
&l;strong&g;Doherty:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g;You&s;re a surgeon, you&s;re a mom, you&s;re a badass, you&s;re on the global stage, I mean you&s;ve got a lot going on. And you&a;rsquo;re an investor &a;ndash; tell me about that.
&l;strong&g;Ang Henry:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g;We were invited to be one of the founding impact investors with Laudato Si&s;, so we said yes. That&s;s why we went to the Vatican. And Orion used to advise a lot of startups, so we started investing in tech. Everything that we do is basically all about impact. Everything we put our resources into &a;mdash; not just our financial capital, but our social capital as well, is in the impact initiatives that we believe in.
&l;strong&g;Doherty:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g;I love it.
&l;strong&g;Ang Henry:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g; It used to be, before social impact, before you and Forbes Impact came along, 100% of our efforts, 100% of our money, time, resources, social capital, our own political will, was thrown into global surgery. I have to say without ego, in five years we&s;ve really impacted the space of global surgery like no other.&a;nbsp;We&s;ve provided not just our resources, but our thought leadership, our contacts. We&s;ve gone through, we&s;ve opened up our space, we&s;ve gone to summits, we go through all our other non-surgical and non-medical related contacts to help us to dig in on the problem so that we can find solutions together. We&s;ve used art, we&s;ve used music, we&s;ve used technology, we&s;ve used film to make that change.
Now we&s;ve gone into more of the social impact investing, where I see a larger picture and a larger initiative coming forward. I see health as an integral part of it but this is bigger. This is the environment, the way we live our lives, the way we make choices.
&l;strong&g;Doherty:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g; I&s;m curious &a;hellip; you and your husband Orion work so close, how does that go?
&l;strong&g;Ang Henry:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g;Awesome. I mean, we&s;ve been partners. We&s;re partners in everything. In life, in the way we bring up our family, in our initiatives. I can say that for global surgery, I couldn&s;t have done it without him. He&s;s been the wind beneath my wings. He&s;s not just been the supportive husband. You asked the question earlier, how am I able to do all of these things? It&s;s because of him. I&s;m able to be a mother, a wife, a public health advocate, a surgical provider. I&a;rsquo;m following my dreams and he&s;s with me, supporting me, helping me, and even augmenting me &a;mdash; because we have complementary strengths. In the places where I find myself weak, he&s;s there. We have this amazing partnership and we&a;rsquo;re passionate about making profound changes. We go about it differently but at the end of the day, we arrive at the same place.
&l;img class=&q;size-large wp-image-90&q; src=&q;http://blogs-images.forbes.com/bdoherty/files/2018/08/Forbes_Yunus-1200x800.jpg?width=960&q; alt=&q;&q; data-height=&q;800&q; data-width=&q;1200&q;&g; Bangladesh, with Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus and co-producer Alemberg Ang while filming The Right to Heal, the first critically-acclaimed global surgery advocacy film that sparked a global movement for increased access to essential surgery.
&l;strong&g;Doherty:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g;So, last question.&a;nbsp;Who would you consider an Icon of Impact?
&l;strong&g;Ang Henry:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g; Wow.&a;nbsp;That&s;s like...that&s;s something that I really need to think about. Because there&s;s so many people I look up to. Is that something I can think about?
&l;strong&g;Doherty:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g;Who came to mind first, when I said that? It doesn&s;t have to mean that&s;s the only icon.
&l;strong&g;Ang Henry:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g;Right! There&s;s so many icons of impact it&s;s hard to pin it down to one person.
&l;strong&g;Doherty:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g;If what you&s;re trying to say is my name, it&a;rsquo;s not going to make me uncomfortable.&a;nbsp;
&l;strong&g;Ang Henry:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g; Well, the first person that came to mind, to be honest with you, was Elon Musk. He&s;s a guy of today who really has made so much impact in the fields that are relevant to our society right now. His investment in clean energy, in building the electric car, in relating his struggles coming out of South Africa to becoming the man he is today. He&s;s the perfect example of a guy who has mastered the fields of science, technology, and business and put it together to create products that change the world.
&l;strong&g;Doherty:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g;Absolutely.
&l;strong&g;Ang Henry:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g;He&s;s the guy, from Tesla with the electric cars, to solar power, and I watched him launch his rocket, for the first time that costs a fraction of what it used to cost to bring a human to space. He changed peoples&s; ethos and minds to say, &q;We&s;re here in the future, and it&s;s possible. &l;a href=&q;https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryancollinseurope/2018/05/21/elon-musk/#1d0979f1651d&q;&g;It&s;s all possible&l;/a&g;.&q; So that&s;s one.
I guess the other one who I am thinking about &a;mdash; let&s;s just do two is the Pope. Pope Francis right now is making &l;a href=&q;https://www.forbes.com/video/5703237703001/?ref=gazelle.popsugar.com#2205d1b16ea4&q;&g;such a statement with the world&l;/a&g;. It&s;s pretty phenomenal because the Catholic Church represents some of the constituencies that have been slow to change, to adapt to the world. Pope Francis has really opened that up. I&s;m Catholic myself and my view of the world is that it&s;s not about divisions, it&s;s about what unites us as human beings, and all of humanity. At the end of the day, it&s;s all about love and about co-existing. He&s;s made these statements that have given me a lot of hope that we can really see that kind of future.
&l;strong&g;Doherty:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g;I love it. Those are two good ones.
&l;strong&g;Ang Henry:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g;Are they good ones? I wish I could find a female one, but maybe the female is me.
&l;strong&g;Doherty:&a;nbsp;&l;/strong&g;That&s;s what this whole article is about!
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