Join Over 100 Health Professionals Trained in Global Health Effectiveness

Over 30 health professionals participates in the Global Health Effectiveness Program last summer.

Are you a public health, medical leader, or mid-career health practitioner? Do you have a passion for improving service delivery to patients?

The Global Health Effectiveness (GHE) Program is an intensive three-week summer program that provides in-depth learning in value-based health care delivery from renown leaders in the field. Students in the GHE program are required to take three courses at HSPH, each with a different teaching approach. The curriculum features seminar-style lectures and problem sets in epidemiology, global health delivery case study analysis, and the opportunity to hear from experts’ first-hand perspectives and experiences in management science.

For the past four years, GHE has enabled and empowered more than a hundred health care professionals to effectively design and manage programs that improve health outcomes for the populations they serve. Past participants represent a wide variety of cultural and professional backgrounds and hail from the far stretches of the globe, from Haiti, to Ethiopia, Kenya to India, among others. They have worked on nearly every continent, serving as a public health doctor in South Korea or as a Global Health Fellow with Partners in Health/Inshuti Mu Buzima in Rwanda.

After learning about the success of the CHW [Community Health Worker] program in Maharashta, a 2010 GHE alum was inspired to develop a similar program. Dan Schwarz, a 2009 alum  also valued the opportunity to learn from and apply the lessons of others to his own work with Nyaya Health, a nonprofit that operates a hospital and mobile medical care services in Achham, a large rural district in western Nepal.

The 2012 program runs July 5 through July 27, and will be held at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) in Boston, Massachusetts.  GHE is co-sponsored by the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School, under the direction of Harvard faculty on the staff of Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Want to learn more, ready to apply? Click here to read more about GHE 2012, and here to access the application. Any questions can be sent to ghe@globalhealthdelivery.org.

Think Local, Act Universal: ASCON XIII in Dhaka, Bangladesh

I joined about 800 health care professionals, from scientists to policy-makers, at the 13th Annual Scientific Conference (ASCON XIII) of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B) that took place March 14 to March 17 to discuss “Science to accelerate universal health coverage.”

The 2010 World Health Report on Health systems financing: the path to universal coverage indicates an emerging global focus in coverage and national financing mechanisms for health. One of the authors of the report, Dr. David Evans, Director of Health Systems Financing at the World Health Organization, shared that over one billion people worldwide cannot access the services that they need, often because of prohibitive cost. An additional 150 million access services but at the cost of financial catastrophe. Bangladesh, like many other low-income countries, lacks a national health insurance program, and although increasing resources are allocated to health programs which indicates emerging opportunities, substantial questions still remain.

Tracking progress towards universal health coverage with equity” Panel (from left): Dr. Faruque Ahmed, Director, Health Programme, BRAC, Bangladesh; M.M. Neazuddin, Director General of Family Planning, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of Bangladesh; Dr. Jeannette Vega, Director, Centre for Public Health Policy, Universidad del Desarrollo de Chile, Chile; Tahmina Begum, Consultant, GIZ TC support to HNPSP, Bangladesh; A.K.M. Nazrul Haider, Consultant, Information Technology, ICDDR,B, Bangladesh

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