Teach to Reach is the largest peer learning platform, network, and community by and for health and humanitarian workers — launched by The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) in January 2021 out of an immunization training programme during the COVID-19 pandemic, and now in its fifth year. As part of TGLF’s tenth anniversary, each month a Teach to Reach Launch Event convenes TGLF Scholars worldwide to share experience, introduce the new courses and programmes, and learn from each other. This is the third of four articles about the 14 May 2026 session.
Faiza Rabbani was sitting in the outpatient department of a small village dispensary in Punjab when a young woman walked past her in labour.
The woman was the daughter-in-law of one of the dispensary’s own staff.
She did not make it to the labour room.
“As soon as she crossed the door, she just delivered her baby. Right there. We did not even have proper equipment to do all that thing. Just imagine. So I was just there. And whatever I had, with the empty subjects, no equipment, you can imagine. The mother was lying down there. The baby just came up. I just thought, what to do. So whatever I had as a knowledge with me previously, I just put up there. And luckily my baby cried, the lady is well, and the next day I sent her back home.”
The phrase to hold onto is “whatever I had as a knowledge with me previously, I just put up there.”
It is the operating model of much of the world’s primary care: a worker, a memory of training, the patient who has already arrived, and no time to wait for the system to catch up.
That same condition produced a story Julius Sakong told from Trans Nzoia in Kenya.
He is a paediatrician.
He walked into a delivery room and saw a nurse pumping a baby’s chest.
“When I look closely, she was trying to do resuscitation. But she does not really know what was happening, because the baby was nearly dying. So this was the issue I tried to deal with. And I trained her on the basic of resuscitation. We have lost many babies in our world because of poor resuscitation skills.”
A nurse improvising a procedure she has never been taught, on a baby who is nearly dying, is not a training gap.
It is a system that has placed a worker in a room where she will be held responsible for an outcome she has not been equipped to produce.
Julius trained her on the spot.
According to the World Health Organization, in the African Region, 24 newborns die during the first 28 completed days of life per 1,000 live births in a given year.
Stanis Mutamba, a doctor in eastern Congo, described the same hinge between danger and action from the other side, the moment when the team and the family are ready:
“I was called upon to care for a premature newborn who was experiencing respiratory distress at birth. Thanks to rapid oxygen administration, teamwork with the midwives, and educating the family about warning signs, the baby was stabilized and saved. This experience showed me just how essential rapid response, ongoing training, and communication with the family are in the care of newborns.”
Three stories from three settings, with three different endings, all turning on what a worker already knew before the patient arrived.
The newborn moments share something with what comes much later in the same life course.
Anissa Ouahchi works at the National Board of Family and Population in Tunisia.
She named the part of maternal health her health system cannot hold.
“In Tunisia, we have a lot of migrant women coming from the sub-Saharan countries. They are just transiting in Tunisia. So they have no follow-up for antenatal care. They are arriving in labour at the border of the country. The access to the health facilities is very, very hard for them, and they have a lot of complications during birth.”
The Tunisian maternity ward sees the consequences of a regional system that has not designed for movement.
A woman who is in labour at the border, with no antenatal care, no papers, and no plan, is the same maternal patient who was sitting in Faiza’s outpatient department.
The geography is different.
The exposure is the same.
The role of health workers, from newborn care to menopause
The thread does not stop at delivery.
The same workers who improvise newborn care are also the ones watching their patients age into a part of life that almost no health system in the room had ready for them.
Marta Trayner Guixens is a physician in Catalonia.
She is in menopause.
She has searched for clinical support and not found it.
“I am an elderly woman. That means I am in menopausal phase and that is the reality. Although I am a physician, it is very difficult to find this support.”
If a physician working in a publicly funded Spanish health system cannot find menopause care for herself, the gap is not an information problem.
Jennifer Barsky, founder of Meno Global, gave the numbers the system has not yet wanted to look at. “By the year 2030, there will be over one billion women that will be menopausal or post-menopausal. And what we found, in looking around at all of the data that exists out there, including the DHS surveys, they stop the data at age 49. We do not have data on midlife and older women, and we cannot be making policy or programs or doing service delivery to these women if we do not understand what is happening to them.”
A demographic and health survey that stops at 49 is making a policy decision before any policy is written.
In Madagascar, Josée Lisette Andrianarson wrote one sentence into the chat that does the rest of the work.
” I am also in pre-menopause and I will admit it is very hard. Here in Madagascar there is not yet a protocol, so the women suffer a lot.”
Faiza’s “whatever I had as a knowledge with me previously” and Josée’s “c’est très difficile” mark the two ends of a single arc.
At one end, a worker problem-solves with whatever knowledge and resources are available, because the baby has arrived now.
At the other end, a worker improvises through her own body because no protocol has been written for her life course.
Between the two, a paediatrician trains a nurse on resuscitation in real time.
A doctor saves a premature newborn because the family has already been taught the danger signs.
A Tunisian physician explains why mothers and newborns disappear from follow-up.
A Spanish physician describes a search for care she cannot find in her own profession.
This is the field knowledge a curriculum on aging, newborn care, menopause, or migrant health is supposed to translate into something portable.
The 14 May 2026 Teach to Reach peer learning event did not build that curriculum.
It surfaced the workers whose practice the curriculum needs to start from.
“Whatever I had as a knowledge with me previously, I just put up there.”
“C’est très difficile.”