Your Money Saved That Kid’s Life
Five thousand miles from Washington, DC, in the African country of Niger, something very good is happening.
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Maurice Middleberg served as Vice President for Global Policy at IntraHealth International.
Five thousand miles from Washington, DC, in the African country of Niger, something very good is happening.
The horrific attack on Dr. Denis Mukwege in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is part of a much larger problem.
Maureen Kanyiginya is a young midwife with a gentle, confident presence. Sitting on a bench in a grassy area outside the rural health center where she works, in western Uganda, she says she loves helping mothers and delivering their babies. "I make mothers comfortable," she states firmly. "I'm a health worker."
Charles Krauthammer questioned the classification of contraception as preventive medicine, stating that “categorizing pregnancy as a disease equivalent is a value decision disguised as science.”
This blog entry was originally published at ONE Blog.
Berthé Aissata Touré is a health worker in Mali, where women have an average of six children. In this country’s vast rural areas,... Are countries with a critical shortage of health workers all alike, in terms of their health outcomes?
Amid the worldwide health worker shortage, some low-income countries are managing to show impressive levels of modern contraceptive use. How does access to skilled health workers affect family planning use, and what are some countries doing differently?
I just returned from listening to a speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Great strides are being made in bringing HIV/AIDS under control.
One of the great privileges of my life has been to know bold leaders in family planning and reproductive health.
Health workers must be retained, productive, and caring if the huge deficits in access to health workers are to be addressed.
Five years ago the World Health Organization told us that 57 countries had a critical shortage of health workers—fewer than 2.3 service providers for every thousand people. Today, all 57 countries are still below this threshold. What’s holding us back from faster progress?
My parents survived the Holocaust; they were Jewish children who spent the war in hiding in France. After the war, they received CARE packages from America. The Marshall Plan helped rebuild France. I once asked my mother what this meant to her. She said, “After all we had been through, it reminded me that there were still good people in the world.”
When we talk about the “health workforce crisis” or “human resources for health,” this abstract language can obscure the suffering of people in need.
In sub-Saharan Africa, a woman is likely to deliver her baby without a skilled birth attendant, making her chance of dying unacceptably high.
Entering a one-room health clinic in Cambodia’s Pursat Province, I saw a heavily pregnant woman suffering on the dirt floor. A midwife was the lone health worker staffing this rural post.