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Five reasons to support Partners In Health Canada this holiday season

Published by PIHC on

Grace Mgaiwa, a PIH Community Health Worker in Neno, Malawi, plays with her youngest daughter Martha. (Photo by Karin Schermbrucker / PIH)⁠

1. Your gift with help strengthen health systems to fight COVID-19 and build resiliency to combat future emergencies

Partners In Health is committed to standing with the families and communities we serve throughout this pandemic and beyond. We are leveraging almost four decades of experience fighting infectious diseases to counter COVID-19 with contact tracing, testing, and supported isolation. Your gift will help support this comprehensive response to COVID-19, while also maintaining critical care for everything from maternal and child health to mental health and cancer treatment.

Public health systems that can test people, trace their contacts, and assist people in isolation and quarantine isn’t only necessary to end this pandemic, or the next one. A global public health infrastructure like that would be a massive step forward in our ability to deliver health care as a human right to every single person.

Together we can end this pandemic and simultaneously build a world where everyone has the health care they deserve. Make your year-end gift today.

2. Your donation provides high-quality health care in impoverished communities, saving lives and supporting families.

Everyone deserves health care, full stop. Whether facing cholera, malaria, tuberculosis or malnutrition; whether they need immediate surgery or ongoing monitoring during a difficult pregnancy; whether they have a steady job or are in dire economic need, patients who seek care at Partners In Health-supported facilities receive the best care we know how to deliver.

Last year PIH teams brought primary care to over 4 million people. For each of these patients, your support is truly a gift

Impact stats from Partners In Health’s global work in 2019.

3. Your donation supports long-term change.

Our approach is founded on our partnership with local governments and our joint commitment to building sustainable health systems for the poorest and most marginalized communities. Such work is long term, complicated, and hard to quantify, but is absolutely essential to long-term, community-driven change. Haiti was our first, and most enduring, example. The lessons we have learned there, and continue to learn, inform the progress we’ve made in other countries around the world.

Take Lesotho as an example. A decade after being invited by the Ministry of Health to help reform the nation’s health system, we have had measurable success in disseminating our work to about 40 percent of the country. We are now in the midst of scaling up our work to reform health care to the remainder of the country’s population. This will be a breathtaking and total country reform, one that moves Lesotho ever closer to the ultimate goal of universal health coverage. Its impact will last for generations.

4. You’ll be supporting a moral mission, in a medical context.

For close to four decades, we’ve battled the forces that keep good health out of reach for billions of people. The antiquated idea that infectious diseases, such as HIV and tuberculosis, can’t be treated in poor countries has killed countless people. Colonialism, slavery, structural violence, and war—such as genocide in Rwanda and civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia—have stymied countries’ efforts to develop functioning, comprehensive health systems. Meanwhile, a lack of infrastructure and intense poverty make it impossible for families to reach and pay for treatment at clinics and hospitals, if such care is even available. That’s why Partners In Health is a social justice organization as much as we’re a health organization. Providing electricity and running water and medications in hospitals and clinics that desperately need them isn’t just about improving health; it’s also a moral imperative.

5. Your donation builds and sustains local expertise.

Staff, stuff, space, systems, and social support—these are the ingredients to strengthen a health care system. We focus on the human resources of health by empowering staff not only with supplies and functional facilities, but also with opportunities to grow in their professions. As such, just as our community health workers accompany patients to doctor’s visits and through difficult treatments, PIH accompanies clinicians, ministries of health, and global decision-makers in their efforts to grow national health care workforces.

As just one example of this, in Haiti the University Hospital in Mirebalais earned landmark accreditation this year as a teaching institution. The hospital was built with PIH’s support as a response to the devastating earthquake in 2010 and has since transformed health care for more than 1 million people across Haiti’s Central Plateau. So far 123 residents have graduated from the hospital’s medical education program, 98% of whom have continued to practice medicine in Haiti including 60% at facilities
supported by Zanmi Lasante, PIH’s sister organization in Haiti

Through mentorship and education at all levels, we are helping to train a new generation of local health care professionals committed to social medicine and social justice. Make your year-end gift today to support this lifesaving work.


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