Donate now to the COVID-19 Frontline Health Worker Fund.

IntraHealth is calling for and taking urgent action to protect frontline health workers from the on-the-job dangers posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

For 40 years, we’ve known that frontline health workers are every country's first line in detecting, reporting, and responding to emerging threats to global health security. That's why we train and equip local health workers on disease surveillance and response, infection prevention, occupational safety and health, and much more.

Here are some of the ways we're integrating virus response into our existing programs, so we can help keep communities around the world healthy and safe.

• In Liberia, the Ministry of Health is using mHero—the two-way communication platform that we and our partners developed during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa—as a surveillance and response platform for a range of diseases, such as Lassa fever, measles, and cholera. They’re also using it to send COVID-19 messages to health workers as part of the country’s response to the pandemic. 

• In Rwanda, our team is redirecting the systems and procedures we helped establish to prevent an Ebola outbreak—including a national call center, isolation units, and training for health workers on surveillance, screening, case management, and infection prevention—toward the country’s national COVID-19 response. 
• In Mali, we’re helping the country prepare through a well-coordinated One Health multisectoral approach. Already our team is reinforcing frontline health workers with new standard operating procedures, updated guidelines, and tools adapted specifically for COVID-19. 
• In Central America, frontline health workers are using our COVID-19-adapted, mobile phone-based alerTAR system to let HIV clients know when, where, and how they can keep getting their antiretroviral medicines, now that public transit and many outpatient services in the region have closed. 
• In South Sudan, our team is collaborating with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to look at the epidemic curves in affected countries, mortality trends, and the population pyramid of South Sudan to provide the government with scenario models and recommendations as it prepares for COVID-19 to strike its population.
• In francophone West Africa, our Civil Society for Family Planning coalition is tapping into its networks of civil society organizations, youth, and religious leaders to disseminate information about COVID-19 in Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, and Togo. Now these leaders are spreading crucial coronavirus-related messages—including a toll-free COVID-19 hotline number, information on personal protection and hygiene, and education materials on family planning—to their followers through social media.
• In Senegal, our Neema project is collaborating with other USAID-funded projects across health and governance to combat COVID-19 in the country by sharing interventions, developing a joint response workplan, and establishing working groups on areas of cooperative interventions.