About Us
Our mission is to provide a preferential option for the poor in health care. By establishing long-term relationships with sister organizations based in settings of poverty, Partners In Health strives to achieve two overarching goals: to bring the benefits of modern medical science to those most in need of them and to serve as an antidote to despair.
Our Impact
When our patients are ill and have no access to care, our team of health professionals, scholars, and activists will do whatever it takes to make them well—just as we would do if a member of our own families or we ourselves were ill.
Through your support, last year, PIH provided:
3.1million outpatient visitsPIH prevents, diagnoses, and treats a wide range of conditions for millions of patients worldwide.
155,400prenatal care visitsA prenatal checkup can detect conditions that, without diagnosis and treatment, could lead to a complicated—or worse, fatal—birth.
847,500home visitsPIH-supported community health workers increase access to lifesaving support and care by checking on patients at home.
What Drives Us
Our mission is both medical and moral. We believe the fight for social justice is inseparable from the fight for health equity for those we serve. We strive to ease suffering by providing a comprehensive model of care that also includes access to food, transportation, housing, and other key components of healing. We refuse to accept that any life is worth less than another.
What we believe
- All human lives have the same value, and every human being has the inalienable right to be healthy to fulfill their potential.
- Our priorities must be determined through listening to the experiences, expertise, and needs of our patients. This is what we mean when we say ‘The patients are our bosses.”
- The right to health is not the only right held by our patients. Other fundamental human rights – such as the right to housing, food, clean water, and education — are interrelated and just as inalienable. Fighting ill health means fighting poverty.
- We will make the most progress through long-term, open-ended commitments to communities and governments we serve, because complex, long-standing problems aren’t solved overnight.
- Alongside the provision of care, training of health professionals, evaluation, research and advocacy are all critical to driving long-lasting change.
Ayde is reunited with Maria Morales a community health worker at Socios En Salud, as PIH is known in Peru, who changed her life and helped her overcome tuberculosis.
DDiaz & MMendoza / PIH
Nurse Mohlomi Maputle conducts a pediatric checkup at PIH-supported Lebakeng Health Center in Lesotho.
Thomas Patterson / PIH
Our History
Partners In Health (PIH) was founded in 1987 to support a one-room health clinic serving a destitute squatter settlement in rural Haiti. PIH’s founders believed the conditions in the settlement — the crushing poverty, absence of modern health care and pervasive poor health — were not inevitable. These were social conditions subject to human intervention and so could be changed — in Haiti or anywhere in the world.
In the four decades since, having served millions of patients across four continents, created thousands of jobs and transformed global health, the work of PIH has proved our founders right.
PIH Canada was founded in 2011 to strengthen the work and add our voice to the global movement for health as a human right.