Every three months or so, Atlehang Seisa saddles up.

A severe form of tuberculosis killed Moeketsi Ts'osane’s mother in 2008, and one of his brothers in 2010. Health workers suspect the disease may also have contributed to the 2005 death of Ts'osane’s father, who had worked as a miner in South Africa.

So when Ts'osane was diagnosed with MDR-TB himself, in 2015, his family and friends had grim hopes for his future.

“The people around me, because of what had happened…to them, it was the end of me,” the 29-year-old Ts'osane said in February, sitting at work in Maseru, the capital of Lesotho. 

Slowing the spread of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in Lesotho means going to many more places than hospitals and clinics.

It means going to taxi associations. Mining companies. High schools. Primary schools. Prisons and police facilities.

Clinicians at Partners In Health-supported facilities around the world provided more than 30,000 safe, facility-based childbirths in 2017, according to year-end estimates—and thanks to a growing collaboration, more and more of those safe childbirths are happening in a rural district in Malawi. 

As she spoke to nurse managers from Rwanda, Liberia and Haiti, Dr. Lynda Tyer-Viola—a longtime nurse manager in Texas—cited a daily situation that’s true for medical professionals anywhere. 

“The everyday minutiae sucks all the air out of the room,” she said, referring to the flood of unexpected, urgent tasks that arise in busy hospital environments. Such tasks often detract from larger projects or duties, Tyer-Viola said, and can change whatever plans managers thought they had for their day.