THET CEO, Ben Simms, highlights how health partnerships are best placed to help realise the health focused SDGs, specifically the hope for Universal Health Coverage.
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| Photo: James Dowling |
The Overseas Development Institute described
the newly adopted Sustainable Development Goals as being an architectural
marvel, soaring and visionary in their ambition. And so they need to be if they
are to do justice to the scale and complexity of the challenges this world
faces.
One in 7 people across the world today will never see a qualified health
worker. According to the World
Health Organization, the worldwide crisis of health worker shortages
is set to grow to 12.9 million by 2035.
Without a major effort to recruit and educate health workers, how can
the commitment to achieve universal health coverage be realized?
Greater emphasis needs to be placed on supporting and training health
workers, building preventative capacity — as highlighted by the devastation of
the recent Ebola outbreak — and ensuring that countries have a health
workforce that is fit for purpose. One way to do this is to effectively harness
the medical and managerial expertise available in high-resource settings.
There is a broad range of ways in which health professionals voluntarily
engage in overseas work. The scale and contribution of overseas volunteering
has been explored in detail in the report by the U.K. All-Party Parliamentary Group on
Global Health. The report recognizes the increasing number of links
between NHS Hospitals, Royal Colleges, U.K. universities and their counterparts
in low- and middle-income countries.
Over the past four years the Tropical Health and Education Trust has
partnered with the U.K.Department for International Development to
create and support the development of such partnerships so that they are more
effective, as well as to award grants that provide for a diverse range of size,
reach and theme. Since the Health
Partnership Scheme was launched in 2011, more than 1,500 NHS
professionals have volunteered to train over 40,000 health workers across 29
countries, helping to improve training structures and fill knowledge and skills
gaps.
The results of this training can be seen in the day-to-day practice of
health professionals, in the development of new cadres of health workers, and
the broader policy and regulatory environment they are working in. Over 500
improved clinical guidelines, policies or curricula have been generated in the
past four years.
Improving the quality
of mutually beneficial health partnerships
Alongside greater activity, HPS represents an important opportunity to
share information and to gather evidence on what works well and what does not
in partnerships and international volunteering. As part of THET’s ongoing
approach to quality improvement, we have developed Principles of Partnership to
accelerate the quality and effectiveness of how U.K. health care institutions
engage in low and middle-income countries. We’ve defined our principles through
consultation with the wider health partnership community and we plan to further
develop tools and practical resources over time to highlight the most important
factors for successful partnership.
A vision of
‘co-development’
At the heart of the health partnership model is the idea of reciprocity,
the idea that all who engage in training health workers overseas, benefit from
the kind of professional growth that brings great benefits to our working lives
back in the U.K. This is what Lord Crisp terms in his seminal book “Turning the
World Upside Down” as a vision of “co-development.” These partnerships are in
keeping with the framing of the SDGs as global goals rather than for goals set
exclusively to benefit the global poor.
Health Education England and the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges
recognize the educational and learning opportunities of allowing U.K. health
workers to engage in global health. Despite this, across the U.K., contributors
to Improving Health at Home and Abroad commonly
reported having to keep international volunteering through partnership activity
“under the radar.” As a result, the scale of health partnerships remains
modest, a fact recognized by the International Development Committee report on health systems strengthening in 2014,
which commended volunteering schemes for health professionals but noted that
the U.K. has “one of the best health systems in the world ... DfID makes only
limited use of it.”
The adoption of the new SDGs is a turning point in the history of how
the we live together on this planet. If that was a moment to be soaring and
visionary, now is the moment to work out how we are going to deliver on our
promises. We must seize this moment to direct the energy and dynamism of health
professional volunteers towards the even greater challenge of building health
systems fit to deliver universal health coverage to every citizen in this
world.
