In the developed world, almost everyone has some kind of access to a family doctor, who can easily prevent diseases like pneumonia and diarrhea from becoming deadly killers without the patient ever needing to step into a hospital. Across Europe, the population-doctor ratio ranges between 200:1 and 300:1; even the United States and Australia, with some of the highest population-doctor ratios in the developed world, have a good ratio of 400:1.
Compare those numbers to the population-doctor ratios of areas with some of the highest child and maternal mortality rates: the Philippines have 1,800 people to each doctor; Kenya has 7,100 people to one doctor; Ethiopia and Liberia each have 33,500 people fighting to see one doctor; in Malawi and Tanzania, each at 50,000 people to one doctor, you may just give up hope at receiving treatment.
In these parts of the world, there is a severe shortage of trained community health workers who perform routine frontline heath services, such as giving immunizations or acting as midwives. The WHO estimates the shortage of critical frontline health workers to be at more than 1 million, while many more that are currently practicing lack the basic training, tools, and medicines to be able to effectively deliver basic health services. Some are so overwhelmed by the high demand, they must perform triage every day to save those they are able, and leave those who may be able to last just a little longer. For some communities, a resident health worker may be the only person who ever treats them.
As a result of the shortage, 7.6 million children die before their fifth birthday and 358,000 women die from pregnancy related causes each year; that amounts to a daily total of the death of 21,000 children due to mostly preventable diseases and 1000 girls and women due to pregnancy and childbirth complications. Meanwhile, diseases like HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis ravage communities, leaving young adults disabled, dying, or trying to care for loved ones at what should be the most productive time of their lives. With more, better-trained frontline health workers, more maternal and child deaths could be prevented, even without access to expensive, overcrowded hospitals.
Enter the Frontline Health Workers Coalition. A partnership between medical/health corporations, the U.S government, and 15 health-focused civil society organizations (including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations, the Public Health Institute, and Save the Children), the Coalition plans to help close the 1 million worker shortfall by helping increase the number of recruits and the standard of training for them, and by encouraging the U.S. government to boost the Global Health Initiative by strategically investing in more medical supplies and training. The Coalition has called on the U.S. government to commit to facilitate the training and support of an additional 250,000 frontline health workers – one quarter of the WHO’s estimated shortfall – by 2015, the year the Millennium Development Goals come due. The funding and training would be provided by the Coalition’s corporate partners, donor countries, and NGOs.
“The world has experienced dramatic declines in deaths thanks largely to the care provided by these local health heroes,” says Mary Beth Powers, chair of the Frontline Health Workers Coalition. “Investing in the technologies and medicines to prevent and treat diseases is important, but insufficient. Simply put, without health workers to deliver the life-saving medicines and information, there is no pathway to good health.”
Ambassador Eric Goosby, U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, wrote in the State Department’s blog on the launch of the Coalition, “These programs are building on Africa's greatest resource of all -- its people. To make a truly lasting difference in our health and development programs, we will continue to support this kind of work. On this and our other efforts to support human resources for health, we look forward to collaborating with the members of the Frontline Health Workforce Alliance.”
Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, wrote in a September 2011 Huffington Post piece: “Innovation can transform a company, a culture, and even the world. But innovation doesn't have to come in the form of a gadget. It can come in the form of a smiling neighbor knocking at a family's door, toting some basic supplies and the skills to address matters of life and death.”
The Coalition was launched today with the release of a report (pdf) focusing on the need and effectiveness of frontline health workers.
Frontline health workers not only are a sustainable, permanent resource for a community to rely upon, but they can also act as cultural intermediaries, marrying medical advancements to cultures that may stigmatize certain treatments or solutions brought by foreign-based NGOS. According to the WHO, community-based health workers are not only able to more effectively identify local resources and areas that need improvement, but they are also critical in preventing – as well as recovering from – emergencies.
For example, during the recent floods in Pakistan, health workers were able to prevent and treat cases of diarrhea that resulted from the polluted water supply, even while living in refugee camps after their homes had been destroyed. In Ethiopia, vitamin A treatments and immunizations have drastically reduced the cases of blindness, while modern contraceptive measures have allowed for a slowing in the population growth rate. Malawi has only 15 pediatricians in the whole country of 15 million people, but because of the efforts of frontline health workers, it is one of the few sub-saharan African countries on track to meeting Millennium Development Goal 4 by reducing the under-five child mortality rate by two-thirds.
For such small measures that the developed work may take for granted, they hold such huge importance to communities who may otherwise have no access to them. Frontline health workers, with each treatment, prevent pandemics and crises that can affect global stability.
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Frontline Health Workers: Global Superheroes
January 11, 2012
In the developed world, almost everyone has some kind of access to a family doctor, who can easily prevent diseases like pneumonia and diarrhea from becoming deadly killers without the patient ever needing to step into a hospital. Across Europe, the population-doctor ratio ranges between 200:1 and 300:1; even the United States and Australia, with some of the highest population-doctor ratios in the developed world, have a good ratio of 400:1.
Compare those numbers to the population-doctor ratios of areas with some of the highest child and maternal mortality rates: the Philippines have 1,800 people to each doctor; Kenya has 7,100 people to one doctor; Ethiopia and Liberia each have 33,500 people fighting to see one doctor; in Malawi and Tanzania, each at 50,000 people to one doctor, you may just give up hope at receiving treatment.
In these parts of the world, there is a severe shortage of trained community health workers who perform routine frontline heath services, such as giving immunizations or acting as midwives. The WHO estimates the shortage of critical frontline health workers to be at more than 1 million, while many more that are currently practicing lack the basic training, tools, and medicines to be able to effectively deliver basic health services. Some are so overwhelmed by the high demand, they must perform triage every day to save those they are able, and leave those who may be able to last just a little longer. For some communities, a resident health worker may be the only person who ever treats them.
As a result of the shortage, 7.6 million children die before their fifth birthday and 358,000 women die from pregnancy related causes each year; that amounts to a daily total of the death of 21,000 children due to mostly preventable diseases and 1000 girls and women due to pregnancy and childbirth complications. Meanwhile, diseases like HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis ravage communities, leaving young adults disabled, dying, or trying to care for loved ones at what should be the most productive time of their lives. With more, better-trained frontline health workers, more maternal and child deaths could be prevented, even without access to expensive, overcrowded hospitals.
Enter the Frontline Health Workers Coalition. A partnership between medical/health corporations, the U.S government, and 15 health-focused civil society organizations (including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations, the Public Health Institute, and Save the Children), the Coalition plans to help close the 1 million worker shortfall by helping increase the number of recruits and the standard of training for them, and by encouraging the U.S. government to boost the Global Health Initiative by strategically investing in more medical supplies and training. The Coalition has called on the U.S. government to commit to facilitate the training and support of an additional 250,000 frontline health workers – one quarter of the WHO’s estimated shortfall – by 2015, the year the Millennium Development Goals come due. The funding and training would be provided by the Coalition’s corporate partners, donor countries, and NGOs.
“The world has experienced dramatic declines in deaths thanks largely to the care provided by these local health heroes,” says Mary Beth Powers, chair of the Frontline Health Workers Coalition. “Investing in the technologies and medicines to prevent and treat diseases is important, but insufficient. Simply put, without health workers to deliver the life-saving medicines and information, there is no pathway to good health.”
Ambassador Eric Goosby, U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, wrote in the State Department’s blog on the launch of the Coalition, “These programs are building on Africa's greatest resource of all -- its people. To make a truly lasting difference in our health and development programs, we will continue to support this kind of work. On this and our other efforts to support human resources for health, we look forward to collaborating with the members of the Frontline Health Workforce Alliance.”
Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, wrote in a September 2011 Huffington Post piece: “Innovation can transform a company, a culture, and even the world. But innovation doesn't have to come in the form of a gadget. It can come in the form of a smiling neighbor knocking at a family's door, toting some basic supplies and the skills to address matters of life and death.”
The Coalition was launched today with the release of a report (pdf) focusing on the need and effectiveness of frontline health workers.
Frontline health workers not only are a sustainable, permanent resource for a community to rely upon, but they can also act as cultural intermediaries, marrying medical advancements to cultures that may stigmatize certain treatments or solutions brought by foreign-based NGOS. According to the WHO, community-based health workers are not only able to more effectively identify local resources and areas that need improvement, but they are also critical in preventing – as well as recovering from – emergencies.
For example, during the recent floods in Pakistan, health workers were able to prevent and treat cases of diarrhea that resulted from the polluted water supply, even while living in refugee camps after their homes had been destroyed. In Ethiopia, vitamin A treatments and immunizations have drastically reduced the cases of blindness, while modern contraceptive measures have allowed for a slowing in the population growth rate. Malawi has only 15 pediatricians in the whole country of 15 million people, but because of the efforts of frontline health workers, it is one of the few sub-saharan African countries on track to meeting Millennium Development Goal 4 by reducing the under-five child mortality rate by two-thirds.
For such small measures that the developed work may take for granted, they hold such huge importance to communities who may otherwise have no access to them. Frontline health workers, with each treatment, prevent pandemics and crises that can affect global stability.
