Global health service partnership: Building health professional leadership

摘要

Shortages of nurses, doctors, and health professionals in resource-poor countries challenge the success of many health initiatives and health-system strengthening. In many of these countries, medical and nursing schools are few and severely short of faculty, limiting their capacity to scale-up and increase the number of skilled graduates and professionals to support the health system. In an effort to address this problem, the US Peace Corps has partnered with Seed Global Health, a non-profit organisation with expertise in education for health professions, to launch an innovative new programme that sends faculty to medical and nursing schools in under-resourced settings. The programme, called the Global Health Service Partnership, placed 31 American clinical faculty-dedicated educators-in medical and nursing schools in Tanzania, Uganda, and Malawi in July, 2013. In collaboration with the schools, the partnership hopes to help to train new health professionals and to retain those already working. It is partly funded by the President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief and is augmented by private philanthropy. The programme is expected to increase the numbers of faculty they place in medical and nursing schools, the countries involved, and the health disciplines included.