ACCOMPANIMENT

Message from Paul Farmer, Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Community-Based Medicine and Lessons from Haiti.

Since 1983 I have worked in Haiti in many capacities, including as a physician aiming to improve medical care. For the first decade of that endeavor, I operated as many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) still do today: my assumption was that my colleagues and I could do a much better job of caring for the poor and the sick than any Haitian public institution. This was an unconscious assumption: ignorance, not arrogance, was the primary driver of this approach. After ten years of struggle in my initial headstrong, do-it-yourself mode, I began to see that my philosophy, not the Haitians’, needed to change. If Haiti was ever to have a healthy, robust means of caring for its citizens, then working with and through public institutions was the only way to achieve meaningful results.

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Accompaniment in Aid Delivery: A Concept Note by Paul Farmer >>

1 March 2012
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Reduced Premature Mortality in Rwanda: Lessons From Success (British Medical Journal, P. Farmer, C. Nutt, C. Wagner, C. Sekabaraga, T. Nuthulaganti, J. Weigel, D. Bertrand Farmer, A. Habinshuti, S. Dusabeyesu Mugeni, J-C. Karasi, and P. Drobac) >>

18 January 2013
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