Health workers—the backbone of our health systems—often show remarkable ingenuity and innovation to provide health services for their communities. In recognition of health worker adaptability and resourcefulness, we launched a Health Workforce Resilience Prize in February 2020 to identify successful solutions that strengthen the resilience of the human resources for health workforce! Applications were accepted between February 24 and April 15, 2020. On June 24, 2020, we awarded $50,000 in prize money to two winners from low-or-middle-income countries that have designed or developed a tool, method, or approach to improve or enhance health worker resiliency. Watch our Health Workforce Resilience Prize Ceremony below.
HRH2030 Health Workforce Resilience Prize Virtual Award Ceremony from HRH2030 Program on Vimeo.
Prize Winners
During the application acceptance period, the Heath Worker Resilience Prize competition received interest from nearly 500 individuals and organizations. We accepted 99 applications from 31 countries. Approaches to support health worker resilience ranged from job aids, online games, and capacity building approaches to new data tracking tools. Applicants included individuals and civil society, community- and faith-based organizations, and for-profit commercial businesses, as well as government, non-governmental, not-for-profit, private, research/education, and volunteer groups or organizations.
Winner:
Vitalk (Brazil) represented by Michael Kapps and Dr. Kate Daley
Vitalk (formerly known as TNH Health) is a Brazil-based social impact venture that applies innovative new technologies to traditional therapy and health coaching to lower the cost of mental health. They have created artificial intelligence (AI)-powered virtual health assistants which currently monitor and triage more than 150,000 low-income patients. In this way, their prize-winning innovation, Vitalk, is fostering health worker resiliency.
Learn about their approach | Read & listen to their podcast interview
Winner:
Nyaya Health Nepal’s Electronic Health Record (EHR) (Nepal) represented by SP Kalaunee and Pratistha Thapa
Nyaya Health Nepal provides free, quality healthcare to underserved communities in Nepal while striving to develop and design a sustainable integrated model of healthcare that can ultimately be handed over to the government and implemented throughout the country. By using technology to facilitate the coordination of care and integration of data, their innovation, NepalEHR, is transforming health service provision.
Learn about their approach | Read & listen to their podcast interview
Honorable Mention:
The African Center for Global Health and Social Transformation (Uganda) represented by Elsie Kiguli-Malwadde
The African Center for Global Health and Social Transformation (ACHEST) is an indigenous pan African organization promoted by a network of African and international leaders in health. It is incorporated in Uganda as a non-profit organization and has been operational since 2008. They have been awarded honorable mention for their three-day training program, which is helping newly qualified health professionals to build self-confidence, networks, and teamwork– a foundation for fostering resilience.
Panel of Judges
Wanda Jaskiewicz, Project Director, HRH2030, Chemonics International @HRHWanda
Wanda Jaskiewicz leads the USAID-funded HRH2030 program at Chemonics. She has more than 20 years of experience in international health and development with a focus on human resources for health, HIV/AIDS, family planning, reproductive health, and maternal and child health. She has worked in more than 25 countries providing strategic leadership to advocate for global and national initiatives to strengthen the health workforce. She has also created evidence-based tools to assist ministries of health to develop incentive packages as well as to measure and improve health worker performance.
Dr. Matar Camara, Project Director, HRH2030 Senegal @drmcamara
Dr. Matar Camara leads the HRH2030 activity in Senegal. Previously, he was posted within Senegal’s Ministry of Health as the principal health system strengthening advisor to the Director General for Health and developed effective working relationships with USAID health partners and others. He also served for more than 15 years as USAID Senegal Health Team Deputy Director and as the principal technical specialist for USAID Senegal in health policy, decentralization, and health care financing components. He was responsible for the design, implementation, monitoring, evaluation and management of policy, health care financing, and decentralization activities within USAID/Senegal’s largest strategic objective. Prior to his work at USAID/Senegal, he served as epidemiologist for WHO/Afro in Burundi and Rwanda, as a public health advisor for the World Bank in Senegal, and as chief epidemiologist of the Regional Endemic Disease Service in the Thiès and Diourbel regions of Senegal.
Elizabeth Lugten, Technical Advisor, Office of Health Systems, USAID Bureau for Global Health @liz_lugten
Elizabeth Lugten supports cross-cutting equity and health systems resilience portfolios in her role as technical advisor in USAID’s Office of Health Systems. She has served as a member of the management team for HRH2030 since 2016. Prior to her work at USAID, she worked for CARE in Atlanta and served as an AmeriCorps VISTA Volunteer in New York.