Clinical officers across Africa have improved service delivery in areas such as obstetric surgery and anaesthesia but they are not the silver bullet.
Robert Neighbour, the managing director of Diamedica, who designs portable anaesthesia machines that will work with an unreliable electricity supply, says it's crucial to always keep the environment where the equipment will be used in mind if a solution is to be genuinely effective.
From its early days purifying cocaine for anaesthesia, the firm's scientists have churned out billion-dollar treatments for everything from high cholesterol to hypertension.
During the 24 days he spent in a Havana hospital, no medical bulletins were issued, despite the fact that he spent hours under anaesthesia and four days in intensive care.
But nobody has yet identified the elusive proteins involved in anaesthesia.
Clearly, however, anaesthesia has not given up all of its secrets yet.
And two other lines of evidence from the paper also indicate that the proteins involved in anaesthesia have albumin-like qualities.One is that only albumin responds to changes in the concentration of isoflurane in the way that would be predicted if it were acting like a protein responding to anaesthesia.
Some succumbed to injury, infection and even complications from anaesthesia.
It was there that he first proposed that condemned prisoners should, with their permission, be executed under anaesthesia to enable doctors to experiment on their bodies, before going on to harvest their organs and use them for research.
One reason might be that procedures carried out later on in life tend to involve general anaesthesia, which brings its own risks and which newborns are spared.
His first experience of warfare, at 16, had ended with an arrow piercing his left cheek as far as the bone at the back of the skull; it was removed with a hollow drill-bit, bigger than the wound, without anaesthesia.
