A program partnering health workers in Rwanda and the U.S. needs to continue
The following text has been partially published on November 29, 2013; in the setion Opinion of the US News & Report
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2013/11/29/how-to-combat-aids-and-the-global-health-worker-shortage-in-rwanda
Over the past decade, humanity has made extraordinary gains in the struggle against the world's deadliest communicable diseases. International solidarity and financing mechanisms such as the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria are saving millions of lives every year. But low-income countries still face a seemingly insurmountable obstacle in addressing these and other public health challenges: a critical shortage of highly-trained health professionals.
While Sub-Saharan Africa bears 24% of the global disease burden, it's served by only 4% of the global health workforce. As the World Health Organization announced last week, the world’s health worker shortage stands at more than 7.2 million today, a gap expected to grow to 12.9 million by 2035.
A report that my colleagues and I published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine offers compelling new evidence about the power of partnership to overcome this obstacle. This new program financed by PEPFAR and The Global Fund provides an example of how we can create a better environment for battling current and future global health challenges in aid-reliant countries.
It's about moving from the condition of dependence to interdependence.
In my country, Rwanda, the Human Resources for Health (HRH) Program is creating a solid infrastructure over the next 7 years to ensure that we are equipping enough health professionals in Rwanda to meet the pressing health challenges facing our people.
Announced in 2012 by Rwandan President Paul Kagame and former US President Bill Clinton and followed by a launch by former US Global AIDS Coordinator and US Ambassador for Global Health Diplomacy, Dr. Eric Goosby, the HRH program deploys nearly 100 American faculty members each year —including physicians, midwives, nurses, dentists and management experts—from a consortium of 25 leading American medical institutions, to partner or “twin” with their peers at Rwandan institutions for at least one year to transfer invaluable skills and knowledge.
This "twinning" enables better curriculum development, teaching, and clinical research that will ultimately empower Rwandan clinicians and educators to take charge of all instruction and healthcare delivery. By 2018, Rwanda’s specialist physician capacity will have more than tripled, and the proportion of the country’s nurses with advanced training will have increased by more than 500%. An additional 550 physicians, 2800 nurses and midwives, 300 oral health professionals, and 150 health managers will have been newly trained in Rwanda—all of whom will have signed contracts to work in the country for a certain number of years based on the degree they obtain. Thereafter, the Rwandan government plans to fully finance the health workforce and medical education system on its own.
By improving the quantity and quality of Rwanda’s health workforce, this innovative program will help us better serve the needs of all Rwanda’s people—from our vulnerable children through improved neonatal services, to our HIV patients who are living longer now that they are on therapy but face a growing burden of chronic diseases like cancer due to their weakened immune systems.
Rwanda is not the only country to benefit from this program, which breaks sharply from old models of foreign aid. This partnership is also a win-win for our American colleagues, who are learning more each day about what it takes to deliver care in resource-constrained settings. Such experiences are already enriching global health programs at universities throughout the United States and opening new doors for research collaboration between our two countries. Overall, this partnership—in both the clinical and research settings—will help the global health community better understand how we can collectively overcome health challenges in a more sustainable way.
Interdependence in global health is not just an abstract idea. In an age in which a single airplane flight can turn a drug-resistant pathogen into an international public health emergency, better-trained health workers in the developing world will improve prevention by bolstering our first-line of defense against serious global public health threats.
On December 3rd, the world has a critical opportunity to harness the power of partnership, when international leaders gather in Washington D.C. to pledge support for the Global Fund’s work over the next three years. The event provides an opportunity for people to call upon these leaders to continue the fight against the devastating scourges of AIDS, TB, and malaria, but also to sustainably strengthen health systems and reduce the need for foreign aid in the future as countries advance in their journey of development.
Each and every nation—rich and—must do its part to think “out of the box” and create new ways of supporting our common fight against these health challenges. If this creativity or spirit of collaboration fails on December 3rd, we will see a chilling number of preventable deaths around the world.
We would also immediately see a projected $47 billion in additional costs to treat HIV infections that would otherwise have been prevented, an estimated $20 billion in lost global GDP due to malaria, and increases in the number of cases of multi-drug resistant TB, each of which costs tens of thousands of dollars to treat—and each of which poses risks that transcend borders.
Infectious diseases have shown us time and time again that the world is just a little village. The achievements of PEPFAR and the Global Fund, and the launch of new initiatives such as the Human Resources for Health Program, show us how much is possible with true solidarity. As my friend Dr. Paul Farmer, co-founder of the nonprofit Partners In Health, likes to say, we live in one world—not three. The time is now to renew our commitments to one another.
Dr. Agnes Binagwaho, the Minister of Health of Rwanda, is a pediatrician, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Medical School, and Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College.
