PHA-Exchange> Global Fund Must Fund Salaries Of Health Workers To Deliver HIV, TB, And Malaria Treatments

[claudio at hcmc.netnam.vn]

 from Leela McCullough <leela at healthnet.org> -----

Global Fund Must Fund Salaries Of Health Workers To Deliver HIV, TB, And 
Malaria Treatments
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http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=68229
19 Apr 2007   

In this week's PLoS Medicine, a team of international health experts issue a 
bold call to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria: fund the salaries 
of health workers or else risk a situation in which medicines for these three 
diseases are made available in poor countries but there are no health 
professionals to deliver them.

"Recent comments from the inside of the Global Fund," say Gorik Ooms (Medecins 
Sans Frontieres, Belgium) and colleagues, "suggest an intention to focus more 
on the three diseases, and to leave the strengthening of health systems and 
the support to the health workforce to others. This might create 'Medicines 
Without Doctors' situations: situations in which the medicines to fight AIDS, 
Tuberculosis and Malaria are available, but not the doctors or the nurses to 
prescribe those medicines adequately."

It would be a strategic mistake, say the authors, for the Global Fund to 
create such a "Medicines Without Doctors" situation.

"The Global Fund has an advantage that makes it a key actor in the field of 
supporting health workforces," they say. "Most other donors are forced to aim 
for sustainability in the conventional sense, implying that beneficiary 
countries should gradually replace international funding with domestic 
resources, whereas the Global Fund has been promised sustained funding by the 
international community, allowing it to make sustained commitments to 
beneficiary countries. This is what some of the countries most affected by 
AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria need to increase their health workforce. Their 
health workforce challenges are too big to consider a gradual replacement of 
international funding with domestic resources."

Ooms and colleagues use the examples of two countries Mozambique and Malawi 
trying to fight against a full-blown AIDS epidemic with a fragile health 
system to underline the crucial role of Global Fund support to the health 
workforce. Mozambique, for example, estimates that in order to roll out HIV 
drug therapy across the country, it would need 8 health workers per 1000 
patients receiving treatment. And yet currently, per 1000 people there are 
only 0.36 full-time equivalents of health workers. Mozambique simply does not 
have the domestic resources needed to pay for additional health workers, and 
Ooms and colleagues urge the Global Fund to step in and fund such a workforce.

Citation: Ooms G, Van Damme W, Temmerman M (2007) Medicines without doctors: 
Why the Global Fund must fund salaries of health workers to expand AIDS 
treatment. PLoS Med 4(4): e128.

PUBLIC LIBRARY OF SCIENCE
European Bioinformatics Institute
Wellcome Trust Genome Campus
CB10 1DS
http://www.plos.org 
 


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