New resources aim to advance global health delivery

By Julie Rosenberg Talbot, GHD Project Publications and Curriculum Manager

Few resources on the delivery of health services and health technologies in low-resource settings currently exist for educators. The Global Health Delivery (GHD) Project has begun to fill this gap with a series of 21 teaching cases and accompanying teaching notes that examine principles of health care delivery in low-resource settings. These cases are freely available for download and distribution via Harvard Business Publishing.

To create the foundation of what we hope will be a growing case series, we identified innovative, successful programs and organizations working in global health. We made field visits to these projects and conducted interviews with key decision makers. We learned about the strategic and managerial principles that helped facilitate these programs' successes as well as the challenges they were struggling to overcome. We then used our findings to create detailed teaching cases illustrating these lessons and the complexities of working in the field. We developed accompanying teaching notes to guide instructors in facilitating classroom discussion of these cases in undergraduate and graduate level courses in global health.

Case topics include global public health approaches to HIV treatment, HIV prevention, tuberculosis control (including multi-drug resistant tuberculosis control), malaria control, malaria control, commodity manufacturing, tobacco control, measles and polio immunization, and malnutrition. Each case is designed to allow examination of four aspects of health care delivery: 1) local factors that affect both the health of the community and the delivery of health care, 2) the program’s or organization’s specific activities that generate value for the communities they serve, including how these activities are organized and managed, 3) how these activities are tailored to the local contextual factors and available resources, and 4) how the program or organization interacts with the existing health care system.

All cases are freely available for download and distribution.

Read more about this new resource from GHD. 

Read an article about the case studies on NPR's WBUR CommonHealth.