Maurits van Pelt

Biography

Maurits is Founder and Director of a Cambodian social enterprise for chronic care called MoPoTsyo Patient Information Centre (www.mopotsyo.org). It sets up Peer Educator Networks for chronic disease (primarily diabetes and cardio vascular disease) which are self-managed and largely self-sustainable. This has significantly reduced the negative impacts of these non-communicable chronic diseases (NCD), especially for people living in remote or deprived areas. Over 85 percent of ‘premature’ chronic NCD deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries. Almost 10% of Cambodian adults have diabetes or hypertension. Only 2% is spent on diabetes control as compared to infectious diseases, and yet the out-of-pocket expenses on NCD by the Cambodian population is by far the highest compared to other conditions. The Peer Educator Networks cover over 20,000 diabetes and hypertension patients in about 20% of Cambodia’s districts. In these networks, patients pay less than USD 100 per year for their care. The Ministry of Health has included this approach in its National Strategic Plan for Prevention and Control of NCD 2013-2020 and in its Standard Operating Procedures for Diabetes and Hypertension (2019). MoPoTsyo hope to roll this out to all Cambodian districts, but questions on how a further scale-up can best be done and how governance can best be assured are some of the big challenges they face and wish to address.

Maurits van Pelt is Dutch and was born in 1955 in the Netherlands to a country doctor and pharmacist. Maurits studied Dutch law while working in a lawyers’ office in Amsterdam. However, after completing his law degree, he began work with MSF, firstly in Mozambique, Africa (1987) and then Asia. He was Chief of Mission in combined sections of MSF Holland, Belgium & Switzerland from 1989 till 2000. Maurits obtained a Postgraduate Degree in Health Policy, Planning and Financing at LSHTM and LSE (UK) (2001). After MSF missions in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, he worked in Beijing with DFID on a World Bank Health Systems Strengthening project. In 2003 he returned to Cambodia to work on social health protection and started MoPoTsyo in 2004 with Cambodian friends. Maurits has lived in Cambodia for over 25 years.