Health Program Reviews 2023

Special Health Programs

Wednesday, March 15, 2023

Agenda

Special Health Programs (SHP) fosters cross-programmatic efforts, new initiatives, and special projects to support the Health Program vision of advancing human rights by leveraging expertise in disease control, elimination, and eradication as well as mental health, collaborating with Peace and across Health Programs, and building the capacity of health systems where we work.

Public Health Training Initiative

The Carter Center’s Public Health Training Initiative (PHTI) aims to build resilient health systems by strengthening the country’s ability to train a capable health workforce. PHTI works with the Sudanese Federal Ministry of Health to strengthen the capacity of public health training institutions to produce more well-trained health workers with an appropriate mix of skills to meet the maternal and child health needs of rural and urban communities.

What is the Public Health Training Initiative?

The World Health Organization has identified Sudan as a country suffering an acute health care workforce crisis. The crisis has negatively impacted the country’s ability to provide essential, life-saving interventions such as safe pregnancy and delivery services for mothers and child immunizations. Maternal and child health indices in Sudan have remained very poor due in part to the lack of properly trained, competent health professionals who can address maternal and child health needs.

The Public Health Training Initiative (PHTI) is a joint effort between The Carter Center and the federal ministry of health in Sudan to increase the number of health professionals who will focus on improving maternal and child health.

PHTI focuses on:

Improving the learning environment of adult students enrolled in state health science training institutions
Training health science educators and health professionals
Producing learning materials tailored to the country’s context and health needs

The Center's Public Health Training Initiative aims to increase quality health care in rural areas to meet the health needs of mothers and children in Sudan, by targeting community training to midwives. (Photos: The Carter Center)

Peace-Health Collaborative Initiative

TCC Health Programs have an opportunity to further their impact by leveraging TCC Peace Programs’ contacts, networks, and diplomacy. When leveraged, intersections between Health and Peace efforts in the field lead to a greater impact in eliminating diseases and improving health. Therefore, TCC Health Programs are in a unique position to pioneer Health-Peace collaboration efforts that will use the Peace Programs team to secure access to Health Programs work and/or use Health Programs to establish a foothold for Peace efforts.

As such, this initiative is an initial step into ongoing coordination that could shape Health-Peace collaboration in TCC geographies, including Sudan. The Health-Peace collaboration priorities- leverage in-country government infrastructure as much as possible, which is fundamental to Health Programs’ sustainability efforts but may be an unfamiliar concept to some of the current Peace Program efforts that rely more heavily on the civil sector.

Future aspirations for the initiative include: