AMREF and the Global Health Council co-sponsored a panel discussion on "Looking Back and Looking Ahead: What Will It Take to Reach the Health MDGs?"
View video of the panel discussion
On September 20th 2010, AMREF USA's Chair-elect Carol Jenkins, moderated a dialog among experts including Dr. Mubashar Sheikh, Executive Director of the Global Health Workforce Alliance, Dr. Seth Berkley, President of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, Dr. Christopher Elias, President and CEO of PATH, and Dr. Simonds, Vice President of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation.
Dr. Mubashar told us that the MDGs cannot be met in the absence of focused action on improving access to skilled, motivated, and supported health care workers. He said that there is a clear link between the availability of health workers and health outcomes, and a near total overlap between the countries facing a health workforce shortage and the ones that account for the bulk of maternal and child deaths. And he gave us a shocking statistic…. “Washington DC has a population of fewer than 600,000 people, but has about twice as many physicians as the 80 million residents of Ethiopia”.
So what needs to happen? We learned that health workers must be at the center of all efforts. We need high level political will and multi-sectoral action. We need to scale up an additional 3.5 million health workers, and we need an additional $40 billion of investment - aligned to country needs and national plans. All this needs to happen if we have a hope of meeting the health MDGs by 2015.
As Carol Jenkins reminded us at the end of the event, we must ensure that health workers are at the heart of all our efforts to address the health MDGs.
