Helping Countries Respond During a Pandemic and Beyond
A systems approach to coping with health challenges and crises
Countries worldwide are facing the dual challenge of responding to a pandemic with already strained resources, while trying to maintain essential services like vaccinations, routine exams, and testing and treatment for infectious diseases like HIV and tuberculosis.
Health systems are also experiencing shortages of workers due to illness and redeployment to respond to COVID-19, supply chain disruptions, stockouts of essential supplies, increased fees, longer wait times, and disruptions.
Added to all of that are the economic impacts from the pandemic, which are expected to decrease health budgets and limit health services — putting access to health care at risk for millions of people.
USAID’s programs are designed to address these impacts, while keeping an eye on the future. We help countries build more resilient and self-reliant health systems that can adapt when needed without risking interruption of essential and routine health services.
Our programs target multiple aspects of health systems, including building the capacity of public and private sector health providers to respond adequately when health emergencies arise so the burden of responding doesn’t fall solely on the government. We train workers and adapt health provider operations so that disruptions to essential services — like COVID-19 or any other disaster — are minimized. We also engage civil society organizations and community and faith leaders to encourage safe and healthy behaviors.
In Cambodia, USAID partnered with UNICEF to produce 14 TV spots (with sign language) and 25 radio spots (including in Khmer and four indigenous languages) that reached more than 8 million people nationwide with information about COVID-19. In addition, a COVID-19 SMS blast went to 4.5 million users and almost 180,000 print materials were distributed to educate Cambodians about the virus, promoting behaviors that help keep communities safe and more resilient to future health emergencies.
In Ghana, USAID’s Health Systems Strengthening Accelerator project hosted a virtual knowledge exchange for technical experts from several countries to share approaches for testing, quarantine, treatment, social distancing, risk communications, and command structures, providing real-time insights for Ghana’s Presidential Coordinator into managing a pandemic response. The exchange of information and lessons learned are helping Ghana determine its own approach to the pandemic, and will help prepare the country to deal with future health emergencies.
In Laos, we worked with local institutions to expand and improve health services by training pharmacists, who are considered a trusted source of information in the country. USAID teamed with the ministry of health to train pharmacists to identify warning signs of COVID-19 and provide appropriate counseling to their customers on hygiene, self-isolation, and home care, and refer patients to testing if needed. The project is also training local civil society organizations to support infection prevention and control measures in communities — especially in rural areas where access to health care can be challenging. We also help disseminate information to the public on hygiene and help the government manage the thousands of daily calls received by the national emergency hotline.
In the Philippines, USAID is helping the country’s Department of Health establish an online training hub for health workers in critical response areas of the country. Since April, we have helped train more than 11,000 health workers from public and private facilities, and two more courses have been added on health care waste management and emergency supply chain management. By boosting the capacity, awareness, and coordination of health workers, citizens are more likely to continue to access routine health services during the pandemic. Our work also supports the development of national- and hospital-level policies, guidelines, and standard operations procedures around the virus.
In Kazakhstan, USAID delivered supplies for laboratories to support more accurate methods for detecting, tracking, and studying the virus that causes COVID-19. And in Nigeria, as part of its efforts to expand access to quality-assured medicines, the government is working with USAID to ensure its ability to efficiently test medical products. USAID is helping Nigerian laboratories achieve and maintain international accreditation to adhere to internationally recognized standards for medicines testing and quality control.
And we are also looking to cutting edge technology. Our HRH2030 Health Workforce Resilience Prize — designed to identify and award successful, locally-led solutions that strengthen the health workforce in lower and middle income countries — was presented last month to TNH Health, a social impact venture in Brazil that creates artificial intelligence (AI)-powered virtual health assistants to lower the cost of mental health care. These virtual assistants monitor and triage more than 150,000 low-income patients. The other prize winner, Nyaya Health Nepal, provides free, quality health care to underserved communities while striving to develop and design a sustainable integrated model of health care that can be handed over to the government and implemented nationally. By using technology to facilitate the coordination of care and integration of data, their innovation, NepalEHR, is transforming health service provision.
The American people, through USAID, are partnering with countries to build long-term, locally driven efforts that increase countries’ capacity to be self-reliant and strengthen health systems to better respond to global health crises now and into the future. Even with a crisis as formidable as COVID-19, we rise to the challenge.
About the Author
Jennifer Jackson is the Senior Communications Advisor for the Office of Health Systems in the Bureau for Global Health.
