When was partners in health created

A global community of mental health innovators. Sort by Relevance Last updated Number of views. Log in. Partners In Health. Organization type:. Organization status:. Founded in , PIH works in close partnership with in-country government officials and leading medical and academic institutions to build local capacity to delivery health care and to strengthen health systems.

Human rights. Maternal and neonatal health. We make house calls. We build health systems. We stay. By establishing long-term relationships with sister organizations based in settings of poverty, PIH 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.

Summary of relevant work:. Core Values of the Cross-Site Mental Health Program Decentralization: Our model focuses on strengthening care in the poor communities in which we serve, as well as in primary care health centers and tertiary care hospitals across PIH sites in collaboration with local governments. Delivery of quality health care made possible anywhere in the world; access to care comes to be considered a basic human right.

Demonstration, Replication, Policy Reform PIH builds healthcare institutions in resource-poor settings by mobilizing talent, funding and supplies; leverages success to access and influence the global health community; and engages media and leading academic institutions to redefine complicated and entrenched institutions.

As a young man, Paul Farmer picked citrus fruit in Florida, learning firsthand about the conditions Haitian migrant laborers endured. He traveled to Haiti just before entering medical school.

Paul set out to prove that cost-effective, high-quality health care could be delivered in the most challenging contexts through an innovative model of care in which local health workers accompany patients through their treatment, delivering services to patients in their homes, addressing needs for food, housing and safe water, and empowering community members to take charge of their health.

Success in Haiti attracted attention from the global health community and influenced policies of the World Health Organization for treating multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis. PIH expands to Malawi and begins collaborating with the government to provide comprehensive primary care to the rural poor. We build a brand new community hospital and two health centers that offer same-day consultation and care—including maternal health care and treatment for HIV , hypertension, malnutrition, and mental illness.

PIH expands to the Navajo Nation and establishes local partnerships to help improve community health and support community health representatives. In , we help launch the Fruits and Vegetables Prescription program , which provides families—most of whom live a three-plus-hour drive away from a grocery store—free access to fresh, local produce.

When a catastrophic 7. Our global mental health care program launches, providing high-quality, culturally sound treatment for common and severe mental illnesses, from depression to schizophrenia. PIH expands to Mexico and begins collaborating with the government to help train new doctors, revitalize rural clinics, and maintain a force of community health workers, who specialize in areas like maternal health , depression, and diabetes.

After cholera is introduced to Haiti following the earthquake, PIH conducts a cholera vaccination campaign that protects 50, people against the deadly disease. PIH opens University Hospital in Mirebalais, Haiti, a bed teaching hospital that provides advanced, high-quality care and offers specialized residency programs to train the next generation of clinicians. PIH begins leading a partnership called endTB , which expands global access to new treatments for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis and conducts clinical trials to find shorter, less toxic, more effective drug regimens across multiple countries.

So you have to adjust and stay ahead of the curve. And so they did. For Dahl, looking back on 25 years, the work is really about this sort of transformation. You see that most NGOs work alone -- when there are thousands of NGOs in Haiti, and simply forming partnerships, connecting to local and national government, makes things much, much more efficient. Beyond the partnerships and the belief that they can and should achieve what they have, Farmer cites the tenacity of the initial group of volunteers in Haiti in the 80s.

Of that original group, all in their 20s, one of them died of cerebral malaria, one died on the operating table of a perforated ileum from typhoid, and a third died about 9 or 10 days after child birth of Semelweiss' puerperal sepsis -- which I was then studying at Harvard Medical School.

So one of the things I was always most proud of was that we didn't back out, that we didn't turn away, as these problems took the lives of our colleagues. Experiences like that inform Farmer's apparently limitless ambition. His first comment on the cancer center in Rwanda was: "It's a beautiful place. Of course every time you build something like that you think, 'How could we have done this better? How much better could this sort of work be done?

What can we look for in the next 25 years of Partners In Health? Dahl says, they'll be "expanding, creating all sorts of partnerships. But we also have enormous interest I'd like to think the work is on a path for exponential growth. According to Farmer, "There are two ways to expand: geographically -- which has been very gratifying -- but the real mode of expansion for us is going to be through others.