Teach to Reach Health workers are sharing how they protected their communities when extreme weather hit

You are not alone: Health workers are sharing how they protected their communities when extreme weather hit

Global health

Today, The Geneva Learning Foundation launched a new set of “Teach to Reach Questions” focused on how health workers protect community health during extreme weather events. This initiative comes at a crucial time, as world leaders at COP29 discuss climate change’s mounting impacts on health. As climate change intensifies extreme weather events worldwide, health workers are often the first to respond when disasters strike their communities. Their experiences – whether facing floods, droughts, heatwaves, or storms – contain vital lessons that could help others prepare for and respond to similar challenges. Read the eyewitness report: From community to planet: Health professionals on the frontlines of climate change, Online. The Geneva Learning Foundation. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10204660 Why ask health workers about floods, droughts, and heatwaves? “Traditional surveys often ask for general information or statistics,” explains Charlotte Mbuh of The Geneva Learning Foundation. “Teach to Reach Questions are different. We ask health workers to share …

Health at COP29

Health at COP29: Workforce crisis meets climate crisis

Global health

Health workers are already being transformed by climate change. COP29 stakeholders can either support this transformation to strengthen health systems, or risk watching the health workforce collapse under mounting pressures. The World Health Organization’s “COP29 Special Report on Climate Change and Health: Health is the Argument for Climate Action“ highlights the health sector’s role in climate action. Health professionals are eyewitnesses and first responders to climate impacts on people and communities firsthand – from escalating respiratory diseases to spreading infections and increasing humanitarian disasters. The report positions health workers as “trusted members of society” who are “uniquely positioned” to champion climate action. The context is stark: WHO projects a global shortage of 10 million health workers by 2030, with six million in climate-vulnerable sub-Saharan Africa. Meanwhile, our communities and healthcare systems already bear the costs of climate change through increasing disease burdens and system strain. Health workers are responding, because …

Critical evidence gaps in the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change

Critical evidence gaps in the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change

Global health

The 2024 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change “reveals the health threats of climate change have reached record-breaking levels” and provides “the most up-to-date assessment of the links between health and climate change”. Yet its treatment of experiential knowledge – particularly the direct observations and understanding developed by frontline health workers and communities – reveals both progress and persistent gaps in how major global health assessments value different forms of knowing. The fundamental tension appears right at the start. The report notes a significant challenge: “A global scarcity of internationally standardised data hinders the capacity to optimally monitor the observed health impacts of climate change and evaluate the health-protective effect of implemented interventions.” This framing privileges standardized, quantifiable data over other forms of knowledge. Yet paradoxically, the report recognizes that “health workers are already intimate witnesses to the impacts of climate change on the health of …

Strengthening primary health care in a changing climate

Strengthening primary health care in a changing climate

and Global health

A new article by Andy Haines, Elizabeth Wambui Kimani-Murage, and Anya Gopfert, “Strengthening primary health care in a changing climate,” outlines how climate change is already impacting health systems worldwide, with primary health care (PHC) workers bearing the immediate burden of response. Haines and colleagues make a compelling case for strengthening primary health care (PHC) as a cornerstone of climate-resilient health systems. First, they note that approximately 90% of essential universal health coverage interventions are delivered through PHC settings, making these facilities and workers the backbone of healthcare delivery. This is particularly significant because PHC systems address many of the health outcomes most affected by climate change, including non-communicable diseases, childhood undernutrition, and common infectious diseases like malaria, diarrheal diseases, and respiratory infections. Furthermore, PHC workers are often the first responders to extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, and heatwaves. They must manage both the immediate health impacts and …

Anecdote or lived experience reimagining knowledge for climate-resilient health systems

Anecdote or lived experience: reimagining knowledge for climate-resilient health systems

Global health

A health worker in rural Kenya notices that malaria cases are appearing earlier in the season than usual. A nurse in Bangladesh observes that certain neighborhoods are experiencing more heat-related illnesses despite similar temperatures. These observations often remain trapped in the realm of “anecdotal evidence.”  The dominant epistemological framework in public health traditionally dismisses such knowledge as unreliable, subjective, and of limited scientific value. This dismissal stems from a deeply-rooted global health paradigm that privileges quantitative data, randomized controlled trials, and statistical significance over the nuanced, contextual understanding that emerges from direct experience. The phrase “it’s just anecdotal” has become a subtle but powerful way of delegitimizing knowledge that does not conform to established scientific methodologies. Yet this epistemological stance creates a significant blind spot in our understanding of how climate change affects health at the community level. Climate change manifests in complex, locally specific ways that often elude traditional …

Aerial view of a flooded urban residential area of Dera Allah yar city in Jaffarabad District, Baluchistan Province, Pakistan. Credit: Gavi/2022/Asad Zaidi

Ten eyewitness reports from the frontline of climate change and health

Global health

The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) has created a platform enabling health workers to describe the impacts of climate change on their local communities. Here are ten of the most striking reports. Published on 30 November 2023 on the Gavi #VaccinesWork blog. Written by Ian Jones for Gavi. In July 2023, more than 1,200 health workers from 68 countries shared their experiences of changes in climate and health at a unique Geneva Learning Foundation event designed to shed light on the realities of climate impacts on the health of the communities they serve. A special TGLF report – On the frontline of climate change and health: A health worker eyewitness report – includes a compendium and analysis of these 1,200 health workers’ observations and insights. Here are ten of the most striking. Samuel Chukwuemeka Obasi, who works for the Ministry of Health in Abuja, Nigeria, has noticed big changes to the …

Honoring health professionals as leaders of change

Honoring health professionals as leaders of change

Global health

We honor everyone who is joining the Special Event “From community to planet: Health professionals on the frontlines of climate change”: health staff from immunization and other areas of health – environmental health and One Health, but also those who fight neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), HIV, and other ailments. We also honor allies, including human rights advocates, those working to decolonize global health, fighting for gender and racial equity as well as economic justice. Since 2016, the Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF) has supported a global peer learning network and platform, built by and for immunization staff from all over the world. This is because we believe that practitioner-led peer education is a powerful philosophy for change in the Digital Age.  In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic, at least 80 million children under one were placed at risk of vaccine-preventable diseases such as diphtheria, measles and polio as COVID-19 disrupted immunization service as worldwide. …