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Health
We believe it is vital that the views and feedback of citizens, responders, and health workers in humanitarian settings are included in programme coordination, design, and implementation.
Photo: ICRC
Good health is central in reducing poverty and ensuring sustainable growth and development. In this space, GTS’s goal is to strengthen health systems in low-income countries by bringing the perspective of health workers and citizens into policy formulation and systems management.
As the Covid-19 pandemic has put unparalleled strain on what are already hard-pressed health systems, health workers are widely respected, yet their views are rarely sought out in a systematic way and even more rarely acted upon. Citizens, meanwhile, have a clear stake in the resilience of these systems and a point of view informed by the user experience.
The goal of this programmatic area is to capture the perspectives of health workers and citizens on issues linked to universal health coverage, health system resilience and accountability and use them to drive change through a combination of opinion research and targeted advocacy. It is about empowering health professionals and citizens to fast-forward community-driven health care reform.
What we are doing
GTS has been working in numerous contexts to provide humanitarian and health workers with critical community perceptions on disease outbreaks and access to and quality of health systems.
In Afghanistan, GTS collaborated with the WHO and the Awaaz Humanitarian Helpline to identify and unpack barriers to essential health services, perceptions on trust in health workers and quality of care, and the general humanitarian response.
In countries where GTS was already active, or had previously been (Iraq, Uganda, Syria, Somalia, and Bangladesh – countries scoring high on the INFORM Risk Index and low on the Universal Health Care index) we sought to learn about peoples’ trust in the COVID-19 response, the fairness of support, and the profound economic impact. We then set out to share what we learned with responders and policymakers.
Contact
Rieke Vingerling
Programme Manager
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