The English class that I originally read "Slow Ideas" for in high school emphasized the value of re-reading texts, so I'm glad that I had the opportunity to do so this week. One statement that really stood out was "We're infatuated with the prospect of technological solutions to these problems- baby warmers, say." The GE incubator is an example of the type of innovation that is too tied to the standard of care we have in high-resource settings; while cost-reducing advancements are most definitely valuable in the crusade to increase access to healthcare in our own communities, they fail to address the very basic needs that are going unmet in the very lowest-resource settings. 

That very same paragraph brought up another point that I hadn't considered very much before this class- the availability of replacement parts for techologies. Even if the costs can be accommodated, there simply may not be a supply chain in place that allows for maintenance of technologies transplanted from other settings. 

The highlight of the article was the story of Sister Seema. While the other nurse was undoubtedly a hard-working woman who cared about her patients, it is really easy for people to become entrenched in their own routines and be innately skeptical of changes suggested by others. Dr. Gawande's book 'The Checklist Manifesto' goes into more detail about the surprising number of physicians who negelect to hold themselves and their co-workers to basic standards of care. Even something so simple as washing their hands between seeing patients can seem like an inconvenience that has no payoff, especially when the adverse affects of illness may not present themselves til later and cannot be narrowed down in cause.