Devex: New partnerships essential for global health success
Ben Simms, chief executive of the Tropical Health and Education Trust (THET)

“…Without a major effort to recruit and educate health workers, how can the commitment to achieve universal health coverage be realized? Greater emphasis needs to be placed on supporting and training health workers, building preventative capacity — as highlighted by the devastation of the recent Ebola outbreak — and ensuring that countries have a health workforce that is fit for purpose. One way to do this is to effectively harness the medical and managerial expertise available in high-resource settings. … The adoption of the new [Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)] is a turning point in the history of how we live together on this planet. … We must seize this moment to direct the energy and dynamism of health professional volunteers toward the even greater challenge of building health systems fit to deliver universal health coverage to every citizen in this world” (10/15).