Project HOPE, Millwood, USA
Member profile
Since 1958, Project HOPE has worked to make health care available for people around the globe – especially children. It’s in our name: Health Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE). From the beginning, when it sent medical volunteers onboard the world’s first peacetime Hospital Ship, the SS HOPE, to its land-based programs today, Project HOPE has been committed to long-term sustainable health care. Its work includes educating health professionals and community health workers, strengthening health facilities, fighting diseases such as TB, HIV/AIDS and diabetes and providing humanitarian assistance through donated medicines and supplies and volunteer medical help. Hope is unique among international organizations in that it has always worked across the health spectrum in a wide variety of settings – from the family and community levels to the tertiary care level – training traditional birth attendants and community health volunteers where resources are limited and cardiac surgeons and biomedical engineers where technology is appropriate.
Main activities
Hope's humanitarian missions deliver more than urgent care and medicines. It provides an opportunity for volunteer doctors and nurses to conduct training sessions and to share medical knowledge with local health care providers. Hope has a longstanding history of partnering with medical facilities around the world. It is focusing on training local volunteers on how to provide care for individuals who suffer from the co-infection of tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. To date, Project HOPE has trained over 350 community health care providers and more than 1,500 caretakers. Working at the invitation of and closely with partners in host countries, Project HOPE designs programs to fulfill needs in the health care continuum while complementing health care infrastructure strengths already existing within the communities.
Links to the health workforce crisis
In the developing world, the health care industry is grossly underfunded and extensive training programs simply do not exist — resulting in a perilous lack of health care providers. It is one of the most severe situations our world is facing and among Project HOPE’s top priorities. Hope is reversing the impact of the health care worker shortage and saving the lives and improving the health of countless individuals by training legions of community health care workers and educating doctors and nurses in areas with immense need. Community health workers help to erase those trends by providing care and sharing with people information that is successful in preventing unnecessary sickness and death. Perhaps the most successful approach to answering the health care worker shortage is Project HOPE’s cascading Trainer of Trainers (TOT) model. The framework of this effective model is simple: Hope invites small groups of health care workers to attend intensive training sessions where they gain lifesaving health care skills and the knowledge required to train other health care providers in their communities. Through its successful partnerships with medical institutions and universities overseas, Project HOPE creates opportunities for doctors and nurses living in remote areas to travel to regional medical centers and receive advanced training that is unavailable in their local communities.
Call for knowledge information:
Alliance Members are invited to submit any relevant knowledge products such as documents, reports, tools, multimedia, links to specific project web sites by sending an email to ghwa@who.int. The Alliance Secretariat will publish relevant products on the Member's page.
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