Have you visited the 2015 Maximize Life Essay Contest webpage recently? The Max Foundation is honored to share that the 2015 Maximize Life Essay Contest winners are officially released! Three winners in total, one for each of the French, English and Spanish categories, were selected by a panel of highly esteemed judges within the global health community. You may view the complete panel of judges here. We are exceedingly grateful for the valuable time and input provided by each of the judges. With 71 meaningful and authentic personal stories submitted, it was no small task to select only one winner for each language category!
We are also overwhelmingly grateful and proud of the 71 brave individuals who came forward to share about their personal journey with cancer. While we may feel from time to time as though we don’t have enough power to affect change as broadly as we might like, we all come armed with our story, and when it comes to inspiring others with hope, understanding and compassion our stories are powerful tools indeed.
So, without further ado, the 2015 Maximize Life Essay Contest winners are:
In addition to each winner receiving a US$300 grant, The Max Foundation is also providing a US$500 grant to the Max Global Network partner organization of each winner’s choice in an effort to strengthen the work that they are doing within their communities to better support people living with cancer. The following partners were selected by the three winners to receive the grant:
Browse essays from this year’s essay collection.
The Max Foundation is a leading global health nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating health equity. For 28 years, Max has pioneered practical, scalable, high-quality solutions to bring life-extending treatments and patient-centered health care to more than 100,000 people living with cancer and critical illness in low- and middle-income countries. Max believes in a world where all people can access high-impact medicines, where geography is not destiny, and where everyone can strive for health with dignity and with hope.
We’ve already seen lots of activity around the world this spring: The first gastrointestinal stromal tumor patient meeting in Hyderabad, India; storytelling workshops where people facing cancer learn to share their experience with dignity and hope; and the Malaysia patient team takes their gathering public with a great picnic! See what else has been happening at The Max Foundation during the first part of 2016.
Health systems around the world are strained due to the high burden of costs. In an attempt to guide decision-makers in their choices on behalf of patients, the topic of value frameworks was born. These value frameworks evaluate all aspects of cancer treatment: clinical benefit, side effects, and improvement in patient symptoms or quality of life. But given the complexities of the multitude of health systems around the world, it is not a straightforward discussion. And right now, it’s a dialogue driven by thought leaders and health economists from the US and Europe. But there are critical voices is missing from this discussion: patients and patient advocates.
The anniversary of someone’s death is always difficult. Just as we recently remembered Max’s passing, we also hold the others who have passed too soon. Below, Beena shares a remembrance of our dear Jaya, who was a committed team member and played that role of a patient advocate amazingly well until she so sadly lost her battle….
