Cape Town hosts the Third Global Symposium on Health Systems Research
The symposium, held from September 30th through October 3rd, addressed the for (a) need universal health care and strengthening health systems, (b) relevant research topics and methods and, (c) knowledge networks and learning. The Global Health Systems Global Thematic Working Groups (TWG) with over 1500 members from more than 90…
Zambia’s Ministry of Health works with economists to determine how best to recruit and retain community health workers
This article originally appeared in The Impact Blog. Oriana Bandiera describes the close collaboration between a team of economists and the Government of Zambia to evaluate strategies to recruit, motivate and retain agents in the rollout of its National Community Health Assistant Programme. Using a randomised experiment the findings illustrate that there is no tradeoff between…
Community health workers respond to Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone
This blog was originally posted on the UNFPA website. In May, Sierra Leone detected its first-ever case of Ebola, the deadly and contagious haemorrhagic disease. By the end of July, the country had surpassed neighbouring Guinea, where the break was first reported, in number of positive cases. The outbreak has spread rapidly…
Your Voice: Frontline Health Workers Are the Unsung Heroes of Global Health Progress
This post originally appeared on the USAID Frontlines Blog With her 3-month-old son, John, lethargic, feverish and vomiting, Korto Kinne sought help in the remote Sinje resettlers camp in the northwestern corner of Liberia. Musu Kpakar, a community health worker, administers a rapid finger-stick test to see if malaria parasites…
Human-Centered Design and the Last Mile: A collaborative approach to empowering community health workers drives innovation
Despite many challenges, Uganda’s village health teams deliver care to some of the nearly 85 percent of Ugandans who live in remote, hard-to-reach corners of the country, or the “last mile.” During some months, these committed volunteers know that they will have the medicines necessary to treat children dying of…