05 - Partners In Health

2013-01-09T21:33:00Z

Medicine through a moral lens.

HQ Location: United States.

Often linked in the public mind with the critical voice of high-profile co-founder Paul Farmer, Partners In Health has, since its beginnings as a community-based health project in the mountainous Central Plateau of Haiti, come to be recognized as perhaps the pre-eminent public health NGO globally. The organization is guided by the same passion that drove those young adults responsible for its conception – namely an overwhelming sense of solidarity, rather than charity, when dealing with the world’s poorest and most underserved populations. In practice, this vision is manifest in Partners in Health’s holistic model of patient care, which emphasizes the need to alleviate the economic and social burdens of poverty that exacerbate diseases like HIV/AIDS and multi-drug resistant tuberculosis.

The game-changing Partners in Health approach encompasses five key elements focused on addressing intractable and neglected conditions: universal access to primary health care, ensuring health and education services are free to the poor, hiring and training community health workers, improving access to food, shelter, clean water, sanitation, education and economic opportunities and partnering with local and national governments to guarantee the system wide scale-up and adoption of new approaches to treating infectious disease. All fuelled by a simple credo: “whatever it takes.”

The results, in collaboration with longstanding partners Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, are impressive in scope. At the beginning of 2012, Partners in Health was providing direct medical care to 2.4 million people in 12 countries, the bulk through local community health workers. Meanwhile, the dream of transformational change embodied in the post-earthquake Stand With Haiti plan was realized with the opening of a state-of-the-art teaching hospital in Mirebalais, with long-term implications for the capacity of Haiti’s public health system and future medical personnel.

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Photo © Susan Peters, Partners in Health

#02 - Partners in Health

2012-01-23T10:58:10Z

Check out if Partners in Health is in the Top 100 NGOs 2013 Edition!

Taking a holistic approach to fighting infectious disease.

2.8 million patient visits in Haiti in 2011.

Over the last 25 years, Partners In Health has provided health care to the world’s poor, fueled by a simple credo: “whatever it takes” – to do for their patients exactly what they would do for a member of their own family. For their patients, this could mean receiving basic nutrition or being airlifted from Haiti to Boston for a life-saving emergency treatment. Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners In Health, is the nucleus of this effort. Inspiring in his own right, Farmer navigated his way from living in a school bus as a child to attending Duke University with a full scholarship.

It was his education at Duke that led Farmer to Haiti for one year before attending Harvard Medical School - and there, working with now Executive Director Ophelia Dahl, his vigor for fighting infectious disease took hold.

Dahl and Farmer co-founded Partners In Health in Boston, three years after their initial trip to Haiti, operating one clinic on its Central Plateau. What started out as a small community clinic for the village of Cange has grown to a vast medical center complete with a full-service, 104-bed hospital, an infectious disease center, a women’s health clinic, a laboratory, a pharmaceutical warehouse, a Red Cross blood bank and about a dozen schools. Their pilot initiative has been replicated and expanded to another dozen sites across Haiti and into the Dominican Republic and the model is further being replicated in 12 countries.

For Partners In Health, it is not enough just to offer free medical services. They have found through their tireless commitment to serving the poor that the proliferation of illness needs to be addressed at the root causes of poverty. A range of barriers can exist to prevent someone from seeking medical care - distance, social stigma or a lack of information to name a few. Paramount to their success is the engagement of community health workers. Partners In Health hires and trains local workers to assist patients through treatment, monitor their needs for food, water and housing, provide health education and deliver care and medicine to their homes. All patients being treated for HIV/AIDS and Tuberculosis are paired with a worker at the outset of their diagnosis. The high quality treatment and daily visits of community health workers have significantly lengthened the lifespan of patients.

For over two decades, Partners In Health has transformed conventional thinking on health care among the world’s poorest populations. Their proven sincerity towards the “whatever it takes” philosophy and their holistic approach to health care has sparked national and international commitments to fighting infectious disease worldwide.

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05 - Partners In Health

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