 I am extremely honored and humbled for the sixth year in a row, the 42nd President of the United States is with us. As our global chair of the regional networks of the patient safety movement, we are fortunate to have President Clinton continue this journey with us to eliminate preventable patient deaths in our hospitals. Some of you know that our commitment-based approach to patient safety was a concept we shamelessly stole from the Clinton Global Initiative. In fact, we announced the patient safety movement's goal of zero by 2020 at the Clinton Global Initiative several years ago as our commitment to CGI, amongst other commitments I had made over time to CGI. Today, this commitment-based approach and your collective work has saved between 81,533 lives and 212,579 lives a year. Yet, patient safety movement would not have been possible without President Clinton's early support and continuous encouragement and direction. With his unwavering commitment to eliminating preventable deaths in our hospitals, we have been able to convince some of the best minds and hearts and we have grown to a movement across 44 countries and even spurring more movements around the world all for patient safety. But President Clinton's compassion for helping people reaches far beyond his involvement with our movement. I've had the great honor and privilege to see firsthand the work President Clinton has done in the United States and around the world to decrease childhood obesity in the U.S. by getting soda and juice companies to reduce their portions and to cut the cost of HIV medication by 10 folds so that millions of people could have access to HIV medication instead of a few hundred thousand. These are just two examples of the great work he has done and is still doing for humankind. President Clinton has unique abilities rooted in his genuine concern for others and his enormous intelligence and an energy to take good ideas and make them reality by getting people like us involved and inspiring them to act locally and globally. Maybe most importantly, President Clinton has been a great teacher. He has taught us that we can do anything and solve any problem if we work in collaborative and productive ways together. He led the U.S. as the 42nd president and now as a global citizen with his belief that the power of our example is greater than the example of our power. Ladies and gentlemen, the 42nd president of the United States of America. Thank you very much, Joe. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. First, congratulations on having your first international meeting. I thank Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Jeremy Hunt, for inviting us here. Thank you to Liam Donaldson, the WHO Patient Safety Envoy, Permanent Secretary to DFID, Matthew Ryecroft. Thank you and your Chief Medical Officer in the U.K., Dame Sally Davies, who also is a new member of the Board of the Clinton Health Access Initiative. So I thank all of you. This has been a remarkable process since Joe made this commitment in 2012 that CGI's annual meeting. We didn't know then that by now there would be about 4,600 hospitals in the network that 83 technology companies would commit to share data, to develop algorithms, and predict dangerous trends that already some 80,000 lives were saved last year in the United States alone. And I just want to say this. I want to thank Joe for trying to be honest in counting the number of lives that have been saved in preventable deaths in the United States and in the networks around the world. I love these meetings, and the only thing that I have to say is that even though I don't get to sit in on the meetings, I try to read the proceeds of what happens because I rarely have a chance to go to a meeting where I have almost nothing to contribute on the merits, and I just learn. I'm sorry I didn't hear Dr. Tedros yesterday, but I did support him to become head of the WHO because when he was health minister of Ethiopia, he faced an interesting challenge. At the time, Ethiopia only had a little more than 80 million people, but 58% of them lived in 60,000 villages of 1,000 or less. And if we could transport this meeting, or if we could have then, to Addis, and we all got food poisoning on the way, we would have been fine. But in the other villages, there were only 700 health clinics for 58,000 villages. So we were asked to partner with him, and we put together more than 2,000 more. His goal was to make sure every Ethiopian would be within at least a half a day's walk of a clinic. And I hope they've continued to make progress on that since we did our part. When Joe said he wanted zero preventable deaths in hospitals, in all the networks, he said, you can't hope for zero. You have to plan for zero. So he's planning. One of the things that it's impossible to know is what the positive impact and new challenges will be with the rather rapid introduction of robotics into hospital care. I dodged robots delivering medicine in the Benioff Children's Hospital in Northern California about a year and a half ago. And what will happen with nanotechnology and what will happen with artificial intelligence? But I know one thing, the decisions that real people make will still make a difference. You mentioned that we've worked hard on the opioid epidemic in the United States through our Health Matters Initiative. And not very long ago, I had the chance to meet with Dr. Feinberg, who runs the Geisinger Health Network, concentrated in Eastern Pennsylvania. They came to the attention of many of us years ago when they had 700 doctors in the network and they made a commitment to anyone who joined that if for any reason, they had to return to the hospital where they were under the care of the Geisinger Network within three months of being released, that all the costs would be borne by Geisinger. And they were the first network of which I'm aware, at least, where all the doctors were given a very thick binder of best practices that was updated every single month. And their position was, this is first the science and then an art. Do the science first. We're going to do what's best known. And as a result, they were able to drastically reduce the error rate, drastically reduce the re-envision rate, had they not done so since they promised to eat all the costs and that it could never be reflected in higher rates or higher co-pays, they would have gone broke. They have now done something that is very important in our work, which I think will contribute to these numbers, which is to turn over the actual prescribing of painkillers to their network of trained pharmacists. So the member doctors actually described the nature and extent of the pain to be addressed. But in almost every case, an opioid is not the first prescription risk. So their view is, OK, we have a universe of people who are caught up in the opioid addiction. That opioids have become a gateway to heroin because heroin harvested in Sierra Madre in Mexico by preteens is now cheaper on the street than a lot of opioids as we get tighter on the distribution of them. But the first and best thing we could do is to stop new addictions as we figure out how to treat those who are addicted. I say this to make a larger point. In spite of this global effort toward disintegration and people trying to hunker down in their groups for economic, cultural, social, and maybe psychological reasons, the best way to solve problems is with diverse partnerships of co-operations toward a common goal. Preventable patient deaths may be caused by many things. I noticed in one of your panels that you said that hand sanitation was a problem that we thought we solved but didn't. But there are many things that can happen. I also wonder whether there are problems we assume were preventable that weren't. A friend of mine died in a hospital in Los Angeles not very long ago, a few years ago, because he had a bacterial infection he contracted in France and he got the finest care available in the Western part of the United States. And when he died, they still didn't know what his infection was. I'm not sure it's fair to say that was a preventable death. I had a cousin, as I have said before here, who was falsely diagnosed with having the flu. And she showed up Friday night in a hospital and she was dead Monday morning because she in fact had severe sepsis. I'm not sure that was preventable by the time she got to the hospital. But the point is, we now have the analytic tools and assistance in place to make judgments like this and to do better. So I think it's important that you be re-energized here. The fact that the politics and much of the economics of the world may be drifting away from the model embodied in the patient safety movement should steal your determination to stay with what you're doing, not weaken it. We all know that cooperation works better than conflict. As I've said several times at this meeting, one of the most influential books on me in the last decade is the first of the trilogy of E.O. Wilson's latest books on human existence, its meaning, its function, and what works, The Social Conquest of Earth, in which he says that ants, termites, bees, and people are the most successful species ever to live because they're the greatest cooperators. That has to be recently amended because spiders notoriously have not been cooperators. They've been lone actors. There are more than 2,400 species of spiders. For reasons no one yet knows, over the last two decades, two dozen of them have started to co-offer. Their webs are twice as strong. They get better nutrition, and they're living longer. This is not rocket science. People have great advantages and disadvantages rooted in the fact that they have consciousness and a conscience. Our consciousness can sometimes make us think we're smarter than we are, and our conscience can sometimes play games on us and convince us that we're righteous when in fact we're flawed. But we have the capacity to go beyond unlike ants, termites, and bees, our own kind, to deal with whole new challenges. And that's essentially what you're doing. You are proving that over the long run, the 21st century, if it is to be the most prosperous and peaceful time in human history, will have to be the century in which diverse groups reach across lines that superficially divide them to meet common challenges and seek shared opportunities. And therefore, you're not only saving the lives that are before you, you may be saving the democratic enterprise, and you may be saving a belief in the possibility of progress. And I think it is really, really important. I think about all this now in different ways. And in terms of the meaning of life and the meaning of a single life in the context of a much broader view than when I was only wondering about whether I could win the next election. I mean, think of it. When this month, last year, in this very month, a year ago, I became the oldest person in my family, man or woman, in three generations. My mother lived to be a liar. And I'm not very old, I don't think. But when I lived to be 70 years, six months, and one day, I had outlived both sets of grandparents and my parents. My maternal great-grandparents and my paternal great-grandparents and my maternal great-grandparents lived well into their 70s, but they lived out into the country in an old-fashioned way. They ate sparingly, went to bed with the son, got up with the son, had a life with slightly less stress than that I've endured. And maybe I'll beat my great-granddad, but I kind of doubt it. If I do, I'll be grateful. The point is that I see this in a different way. Every day is a gift to me. And I also have lived long enough now to know that in almost every endeavor, there are no permanent victories or permanent defeats. All there is is the permanent gift of choice and life to try. This January, Hillary and I had what was her first vacation really since the 2016 election because she wound up working on her book through our previously scheduled vacation. I took her to Hawaii. And we went to the Big Island. And one day, we went up 13,000 feet to look into the Keck telescope, the largest telescope on planet Earth to see beyond our own solar system, beyond our own galaxy. And then they took us down 3,500 feet to the best place to see the night sky with an naked eye. And I could barely pick out the constellation Orion because unlike every place else I've ever viewed it, those stars were not alone, but bathed in thousands upon thousands of others. I had never seen so many stars in the night sky. And I asked the people there who ran the operation. I said, what do all of you think about the prospects of life, sense life on other planets? And he said, well, there's a great debate here. We're really divided. I said, what are you divided? What's the range? He said a probability of 95% to a probability of 100%. He said, in our own solar system, we've already identified 20 planets that seem far enough away from their suns and dense enough that they might be able to support life. Beyond here and the billions and billions and billions of stars left in the universe, it's inconceivable. It might seem small. To me, it makes it more significant. When I was president near the end of my service, we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the first walk on the moon. And the surviving astronauts came to see me. And the NASA guys, our space agency, they kind of liked me because I put a lot of money in there. And I'm a believer in all that. So they had with them a vacuum-packed rock that was taken off the moon. So we posed with the rock. And I said, how old is it? They said it's been carbon-dated at 3.6 billion years old. In other words, a few hundred million years before, as far as we can tell, the first single-cell organisms formed out of the premortal slime on planet Earth. I said, can I borrow that? And they said, you can't have it. I said, I don't want it. I want to borrow it. And I said, it'll be safe. It'll be here in the White House. So I put it on the table. When you see on television that the president of the United States is entertaining a world leader in the Oval Office, you know, there's two chairs, and there's a little table in front of them. And there's couches on each side of the table. I put that moon rock there. And then whenever people came into the Oval Office, I got out of the Republicans and the Democrats come in and they talk, and they started to fight, and they'd raise their voices. I said, wait a minute, guys. See that rock there? It is 3.6 billion years old. We are just passing through here. We have a nanosecond in the scope of human existence to do something good or bad. So let's just take a deep breath, settle down, and figure out what we're going to do. It always worked. By being humble, we became bigger. By feeling smaller, we were able to think larger. What's that got to do with what you're doing? I think two things about all these lives that are being saved. First of all, especially if this movement can spread, as Tedros said, into the developing world, God only knows what these people whose lives you save may accomplish in their lives. But secondly, from the perspective I now occupy, since we're in London, I can say that every passing year convinces me that the great English poet Wordsworth was right when he said, the last best hope of a good person's life are the little unremembered acts of kindness and love, that the things that we can all share are the things that matter most. And all of our university degrees and all of our advanced learning and all of our skills and all of the whatever else we do, gain more meaning when we give the simple gift of one more day to other people. And I think about it every day because one of the gifts of a long life is that more and more people you care about aren't around anymore. I wear these shoes because they were given to me by a man who died a few years ago. I tried to help through the last three years of his illness but 50 years ago when we were young, we lived in Oxford and he took care of me. So every time I put these shoes on I think about what it was like to be young in England or in the words of Willie Morris, oh to be in April now that England's here. I'm saying this because it's really important that you guys not get discouraged. And it's really important that you not turn these numbers into something unhuman. You should keep score because underneath the score there is something, the dimension of which you cannot imagine. If you believe there's an after life you are bringing this sacred into this life. If you don't and this is all we got it all lasts as long as it possibly can. And while it's lasting it ought to be as good as it possibly can be. So what I wanted to do is to say I think the regionalization of this movement is important but you should take in the developing world. One of the things that I learned when I started our work with AIDS is that we just fell into this is that because so many people in Africa were dying of HTV and malaria we overlooked the fact that in poor countries cancer rates are more or less consistent with what they are in other countries. So when the Rwandans asked us to come in and help them rebuild their health system after the genocide and we put a hospital in every region of the country, friend of mine, Jeff Gordon, a famous race driver gave us the money to establish a cancer center in the last of the hospitals we built in Butaro near the Ugandan border. And then it was hooked into the international network of children's hospitals so that they could actually access all the information they needed to maximize the treatment impact on young children with cancer in Central Africa. We are just at the beginning of this but we have to face the fact that there are all kinds of problems we're trying to fix people which wind up causing them to die sooner in hospitals in the United States and in other countries. And I was, and that you just when you think you've got something stopped you realize you don't. That's what I love the title in your program about the hand sanitation problem we thought we saw. I remember when C-sections used to be performed because we thought it was safer for the mother and sometimes it still is. But I found it fascinating you were dealing with that. I know that tubal feeding has saved many lives but I now know how many it can cost because of what you're doing. This is all real stuff. Don't let unreal headlines blind you to real trend lines. Whenever I speak to young people in the United States I said, you know, the headlines may be lousy but the trend lines on balance are good. If you make any kind of decision in your personal life or as a citizen based only on headlines you have a better than a 50% chance of making a mistake. You had to first ask that the headlines reflect the trend lines. If they don't then you have to calibrate the decision based on the headlines which may be today and the trend lines which are tomorrow. Because all of us have an obligation to make the trend lines better. That's really what Martin Luther King meant when he said the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. And then everybody forgets the second part we have to do the bending. And so I wanna leave you with that. What you were doing is about the meaning of life. If all you did was wanna process people to the health system you wouldn't pay so much attention to this. The revenues can be generated about the same way. Now in countries with really humane comprehensive health systems it matters a lot like in the UK and we know in the US it probably cost us $30 billion a year to have all these people die when they shouldn't and that's all really important. But that's not why you should do it. You should do it so one more person can find out whether there's life in the universe. So that when it comes down to it our people will be conditioned to embracing the commonality of life and enjoying the differences in the context of that. So that when people show up here in a spaceship we don't kill each other. You should do it because there's a child somewhere who's claimed to grow up, love nature, fall in love, have children is no less than your own. You should do it because you made a choice all of you one way or the other to save and enhance lives or you wouldn't be here. And when you're in that space you have to accept the fact that you won't always succeed, that you may make a mistake, that circumstances may intervene beyond your own control but every single day you can get better at what you're doing. And the thing that I loved about the commitment Joe County made six years ago is that he was basically drawing a conclusion from the data he had and the experience he had with advances in his own field, non-invasive medical technologies for vital measurements. And he concluded that this was a problem we could whip, that it would be cheaper than brain surgery per person. Our complicated cancer surgery are putting people back together after a horrible car accident are dealing with the consequences of explosive devices on battlefields, that if we did it right we could probably save more lives for less money and less time than most of the things that we're organized to do. And that a big challenge in every human life is making sure you're organized to deal with areas of greatest opportunity as well as the areas of greatest problem. So that's how I think about this. We are basically reordering this incredibly complicated ecosystem to seize the simplest and most profound of all opportunities and to fulfill our obligation to give other people the chance to do what at least people of my age who have more yesterdays than tomorrow have already done. It is a noble good thing and there's plenty more still to do. Thank you.