PIH Welcomes Dr. Gary Gottlieb
Posted on Jan 9, 2015
This week Partners In Health Co-founders Dr. Paul Farmer and Ophelia Dahl penned an opinion piece in The Boston Globe about the recent announcement that Dr. Gary Gottlieb will be taking the helm of PIH later this year. Farmer and Dahl, who say Dr. Gottlieb's transition "has to be seen as one of the great boons to global health in these frightening times," note that Gottlieb will be tasked with leading PIH's Ebola response in West Africa and will bring his decades of experience building health systems to PIH sites around the world.
Farmer and Dahl write:
A clinician, a designer and organizer of care, a teacher and mentor of students and trainees, a funder of some of the world’s leading medical research—that’s been Gottlieb’s job description since he became CEO of Partners HealthCare in 2010.
At some level, running a complex system of sites and providers in eastern Massachusetts isn’t so different from doing it in remote, impoverished places like Liberia or much of Haiti. How do you balance the right investment in a series of smaller centers connected to larger ones, distribute the care, sustain the infrastructure, maintain the supply chain, and deepen the finding pot? How can a system become, in Gottlieb’s words, “an economic driver for a region, creating vendors of every nature, a place where you can grow food?” The work of public health leaders everywhere is to try to move from our “illness system” to a genuine “health care system,” which is hard to keep sight of during an emergency like Ebola. But a key lesson from Ebola is the need for well-designed, well-resourced medical and nursing schools, plus labs able to conduct surveillance and to guide early and effective responses.
While Boston-level infrastructure in West Africa might seem a crazy ambition, this actually will be Gottlieb’s mission. But we can learn lessons from Africa, too. As we’ve discovered in Rwanda, we must deliver care closer to where people live. We also need to recruit, train, equip, and retain an army of community health workers.
