Words by Smiley Team
Today, the world is short of about 7.2 million health care workers. By 2035, according to the World Health Organisation, this figure is likely to have risen to 13 million. If these statistics remain unchanged, a billion people will never see a qualified health worker in their lives.
It’s for this reason that, back in 2011, the UK-based Tropical Health and Education Trust (THET) joined with the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID) to launch a Health Partnership Scheme (HPS).
Essentially, the idea is to form partnerships between UK health institutions and their counterparts in low- and middle-income countries around the world — to share learnings, to train peers, and to bring mutual benefits to both the UK and the partner countries.
And it’s proved to be a “catalyst for unprecedented levels of engagement” both for UK medics and their counterparts in Africa and Asia, according to THET in a new progress report published on Friday.
In fact, over the past eight years, over 2,000 NHS staff have now volunteered with the scheme and helped train 93,112 health workers — including over 46,600 female health workers — across 30 countries.
Medics have spent more than 103,000 days volunteering; 210 projects have been delivered; and 499,568 patients are now using improved services as a result, according to THET’s report.
A few projects supported by the initiative include working towards reducing maternal deaths in Uganda; to improve the quality of hospital care for seriously sick and injured children and newborns in Myanmar; and to strengthen surgical and anaesthesia capacity in eastern and southern Africa
UK volunteers were also in Nepal before the earthquake struck and played “an exemplary role in assisting the country in its recovery,” according to THET.
Before its launch, funding for this kind of activity at this scale had reportedly never before been provided in the UK.
The focus for the scheme has been led by DfID’s health priorities — and include reproductive, maternal, and newborn health, as well as malaria prevention. Meanwhile, there is a strong focus on rural areas where health infrastructure is often at its weakest.
What’s more, DfID commissioned an independent evaluation of the initiative back in 2016, which reportedly found “overwhelming evidence” of the effectiveness of the partnership model in “strengthening the capacities of health workers and the institutions in which they work.”
It also noted that the scheme “represented good value for money compared to other approaches.”
According to Louise McGrath, head of programmes at THET, where health partnerships can really add value is through “enabling the sharing of learning and experience between health systems and teams, to identify where improvements in the quality of care can be made, and finding ways of working together to do this.”
Original article by Imogen Calderwood - Source Global Citizen
Photo by JC Gellidon on Unsplash
