Blogs by David Olson

That was the inspiration for the briefing, “Championing Health Workers: The Best Way to Improve Global Health and Save Lives for Less,” organized by IntraHealth and Save the Children in conjunction with the Congressional Global Health Caucus. 

The event was the precursor of an incipient movement whose vision is “that everyone has access to basic preventative and curative health care by skilled, supported and motivated frontline health workers — the Frontline Health Workers Coalition. Founding members include AMREF, CARE, Earth Institute, Family Care International, IntraHealth, Millennium Promise, ONE, Partners in Health, RESULTS, Save the Children, UN Foundation, White Ribbon Alliance and World Vision. 

The main goal of the Coalition — which will be launched formally before the end of the year — is to get the U.S. Global Health Initiative (GHI) to support an additional 250,000 new frontline health workers, and to better deploy, train and support existing workers where the need is greatest. Amie Batson, the assistant administrator for Global Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development, said that GHI already has an explicit mandate to “train and retain” 140,000 workers, leaving a gap of 110,000.

Mugara Joseph Mahungururo, a real life frontline health worker and midwife from Muhimbili National Hospital in Tanzania, was there to make the case.

“It’s so challenging to be a pregnant woman in my country,” she said. But she cited a variety of ways the U.S. government is already helping — by training midwives, educating pregnant women, providing voluntary HIV counseling and testing, providing bednets and eradicating malaria in Zanzibar, among other things.

“Keep on helping us [the health workers] protect pregnant women,” was her appeal to the U.S. Congress.

Ms. Batson gave examples of what the U.S. government is already doing to support health workers but she said the countries themselves are leading the way. In Afghanistan, the government has introduced a contract with girls to be trained in midwifery on the condition that they return to their villages and apply their new skills. In Ethiopia, the government has expanded the concept of health extension workers and task-shifting. And Rwanda is experimenting with performance-based financial incentives.

Maurice Middleberg, vice president for Global Policy at IntraHealth, said that although a revolution in service delivery has been equally responsible for improved health outcomes as better vaccines and technologies, too little progress has been made on increasing and supporting health workers. He called it a “failure of implementation.”

Mr. Middleberg outlined IntraHealth’s philosophy on frontline health workers: They should be “present, ready, connected and safe.” Achieving that, he said, is a shared responsibility, and more should be expected of developing country governments, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the Global Fund and the GAVI Alliance.
Mary Beth Powers, campaign chief for Newborn and Child Survival at Save the Children, called on the Global Health Initiative to deliver three things: