Director’s Statement

Dear Friends,

	Ophelia Dahl

As 2011 draws to a close, Partners In Health is approaching several major milestones. On January 12, we will observe the second anniversary of the devastating earthquake that destroyed Haiti’s capital and killed over a quarter million people. Six months later, we will celebrate the opening of the 320-bed, national referral and teaching hospital we have been building at breathtaking speed in Mirebalais. Around the same time, we will spend the last of the tens of millions of dollars we received after the earthquake, fulfilling the commitment of our Stand With Haiti plan to invest it all in emergency relief and long-term reconstruction over a 30-month period. 

On my first visit to Haiti following the earthquake, I observed, “Haiti’s catastrophe will forever divide its history into before earthquake and after.” I also realized, although I didn’t say so at the time, that the earthquake would demarcate PIH’s history as well.

In the two years since the earthquake—with the support of so many of you who have rallied to our side—our Haitian colleagues have truly performed miracles. They have worked tirelessly to provide lifesaving medical care to tens of thousands of people affected first by the earthquake and then, less than a year later, by a deadly outbreak of cholera that has now killed more than 6,500 people and sickened nearly half a million. They have reinforced our own services and supported national initiatives to strengthen rehabilitative medicine, mental health, and other specialties that had always been weak in Haiti and were even more desperately needed by a population scarred physically and emotionally by the back-to-back disasters. And they have managed to push ahead with major initiatives to rebuild Haiti’s public systems for health and education of health professionals. 

Mirebalais Hospital is not just the biggest reconstruction project undertaken anywhere in Haiti since the earthquake. When it opens it will stand as the finest hospital in the country, as a center of excellence for education of the next generation of Haitian doctors and nurses, and as a beacon of hope for the people of Mirebalais, the Central Plateau, and the entire nation.

Even as we have necessarily focused attention and resources on Haiti, our projects in 11 other countries have not only maintained and strengthened their existing services but have managed to innovate game-changing approaches to maternal mortality, cancer, and other intractable and neglected conditions among the poor. 

Complications of pregnancy and childbirth still kill nearly 1,000 poor women a day. Over the past two years, our Lesotho team has pioneered and rapidly scaled up an innovative program that has already recorded significant increases in women receiving pre- and post-natal care and delivering their babies at health centers in some of the world’s poorest and most isolated communities.

Cancer is among the diseases that have been largely neglected in developing countries. Even though developing countries bear 80 percent of the world’s burden of cancer, they receive only five percent of the resources devoted to prevention, treatment, and palliative care. Nearly 2.5 million cancer deaths a year in developing countries could be averted using prevention and treatment interventions that are widely available and readily affordable, according to a report published recently by a global task force PIH helped form and lead, along with our partners at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The report highlights PIH projects in Rwanda and Haiti as pioneering initiatives to prevent and treat a variety of cancers, including cervical cancer and Burkitt’s lymphoma, a deadly but treatable disease that is the most common malignancy among children in Africa. In 2012, together with the Rwandan Ministry of Health, the Jeff Gordon Children’s Foundation, and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, we will open the first pediatric cancer center in rural Africa at the new Butaro District Hospital in Rwanda. 

These and similar innovations at all of our sites testify to our unyielding commitment to provide the highest quality care to the 2.4 million poor people we now serve directly, even when that means defying conventional wisdom and prevailing policies. They also speak to our dream of transformational change that will make the world a healthier, more equitable place. As we have shown with treatment for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis and HIV, one can lead to the other—well-documented local success to global change of direction, innovation to transformation.

Perhaps our proudest accomplishment over the past year has been our ability to come together, from projects in 12 countries on four continents, to map out a strategy to keep our commitments and further our dreams. At the heart of our strategy is a rededication to the research, education, and training that are essential to our mission—to improving the quality of our work; to creating the evidence base needed to leverage changes in global health policies and priorities; and to building the capacity of individuals and institutions to plan and implement programs that truly benefit the poor.

Our strategic discussions took place in the shadows of the enormous responsibilities we have shouldered since the earthquake and of the daunting fundraising task that looms when our Stand With Haiti Fund is exhausted in mid-2012. I draw profound inspiration from my colleagues who, even as we face the challenge of providing more and better services with fewer resources, have embraced an ambitious strategy: we will continue to meet the needs of the communities we serve, and build on that work with new research and training efforts that will help catalyze policy changes and strengthen the movement for global health equity and social justice. 

With that kind of selfless dedication to the greater good, and with your continuing support, I am confident that together we will be able to rise to the challenge, to fulfill our commitments, and to realize our dreams.

Ophelia Dahl
Executive Director, Partners In Health