12 Jan HRH2030 Director’s Digest: January 2021
January 2021: Welcome, New Year!
Dear Colleagues,
Has a new year ever been as eagerly anticipated as this one? With the close of 2020, and vaccines for COVID-19 now becoming available, all of us are hoping for a better 2021—and I speak for all of us working on the HRH2030 program when I say that in particular, we’re looking forward to a better year for health workers. The World Health Organization’s designation of 2021 as the International Year of Health and Care Workers, holds the promise of a global community more ready to act on the heightened awareness of the need for a well-resourced, well-managed workforce.
We’ll be looking at some of the actions countries and donors have already taken in our upcoming event, “No Return to Normal: Ensuring an Optimized Health Workforce in the Post COVID-19 Recovery.” I hope you’ll join me and USAID’s Health Workforce Branch Chief, Diana Frymus, as we examine some policy adaptations and financing decisions resulting from the pandemic. You can register here. Last month, Diana and I shared a blog discussing how assessing the community-based workforce can help to optimize HIV programs, a timely topic as evidence increasingly highlights the valuable contributions of community-based health workers, which have become especially relevant during this COVID period.
In Mali, we’re seeing that communities themselves are important drivers in ensuring access to health care services. In our newest photo essay, “Composting for Health Care,” we take a look at how one women’s group has helped find a sustainable solution to the costs of visiting a new maternity center and increased the number of women accessing prenatal care and delivery services.
Much remains to be done to build, manage, and optimize the health and care workforce to ensure health for all. My colleague Rachel Deussom attended the Sixth Global Symposium on Health Systems Research late last year, and she captured some thoughts on how to strengthen health systems to better serve the most underserved populations in this recent blog.
Before we completely leave 2020 in the rear-view mirror, I want to shine a final light on the work of our colleagues on the HRH2030 Philippines activity. We concluded our work in the Philippines in June and published our legacy Infographic and Resource Library with the October issue of this newsletter. This month, we’ve published our final report on the work in the Philippines and have a new story celebrating this activity’s contributions towards advancing human resources for health.
Wishing all of you a healthy and productive 2021!
Best,
Wanda Jaskiewicz
Project Director, HRH2030