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Hitting the (Super) Target: Shopping for Tools for Health System Success

Tool [noun]: Anything used as a means of accomplishing a task or purpose1 [emphasis added].
Crystal Ng
At any particular moment, there are likely dozens of international health professionals working on the development or revision of tools, ranging from assessment questions to frameworks and diagrams to software. Think of international health as a Super Target that offers resources for nearly every question you can imagine. When provided the opportunity, we can shop for potential resources manufactured by various organizations, but these resources only become tools when we take the products off the shelf and actually put them into use. Read more »

Global Health: A Historic and Momentous Movement

This post was originally published on the IntraHealth International blog.

I just returned from listeMaurice Middlebergning to a brilliant and inspiring speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Secretary Clinton traced the history of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, from the dark days of the 1980s, when little to nothing was understood about the disease and how to fight it, to today, when, armed with the tools made possible by science, great strides are being made in bringing HIV/AIDS under control. As she correctly pointed out, United States (US) leadership and investment have been at the forefront every step of the way. Investments in science led to understanding the virus, developing treatment, and building evidence-based prevention programs. The result has been a marked decline in the incidence of the disease, millions of infections prevented, and millions under treatment. Many institutions and people have contributed to this remarkable change. That said, the contribution of the US government to the fight against HIV/AIDS has been essential to the progress achieved. The US contribution to the cause of fighting HIV/AIDS, and global health more generally, has been a pillar of US leadership in the world. Read more »

The Seven-Billionth Person: A Global Health Workforce Perspective

This post was originally published on the IntraHealth International blog.

Sara Pacqué-MargolisOn October 31st the world welcomed Danica in the Philippines, Nargis in India, and numerous other babies who symbolize the seven-billionth person on our planet. It’s a timely moment to shine some light on the implications of population growth for the health and well-being of all our children and the generations to come.

Here’s the crux: the global shortage of health workers translates to an estimated billion people with no access to essential health services, according to a 2010 World Health Organization (WHO) report. So exactly how many health workers do we need to address this problem? The WHO has determined that 2.3 doctors, nurses, and midwives per 1,000 people is the minimum threshold needed to cover the population with essential health services. This is commonly referred to as the health worker density ratio.

Now here’s where the issue of population growth comes in. Planning and policy efforts to improve the health worker density ratio have focused on increasing the ratio’s numerator (health workers). Makes sense, right? But they’ve largely ignored the ratio’s denominator (population size). Read more »

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