Paul Farmer, Founder of Partners in Health and the Power of Dynamic Pathways
Paul Farmer, trained as a physician and an anthropologist, started Partners in Health in Haiti in 1987 and has now expanded into eleven other countries, to combat what he called “stupid deaths.” In his own words, “I was tempted to record the cause of death as a weak health system for poor people” those uninsured and undeserving people who “fell through gaping hole in the safety net”—“too poor to survive catastrophic illness.”
Certainly the restraining societal and systemic forces of poverty, generations of poverty, were no match for the country’s driving forces, a small and under-financed army of doctors, nurses and equipment.
His solution was to train and support an undervalued set of resources, local and community health workers to “accompany patients through their treatment, delivering their treatment in their homes, addressing needs for food, housing, safe water, etc.
In other words, Paul Farmer put undervalued resources (health workers) systematically and at once through both a “time pathway,” that is, to follow patients through the course of a chronic illness and a “place pathway” -- peoples’ own homes.
Paul Farmer, trained as a physician and an anthropologist, started Partners in Health in Haiti in 1987 and has now expanded into eleven other countries, to combat what he called “stupid deaths.” In his own words, “I was tempted to record the cause of death as a weak health system for poor people” those uninsured and undeserving people who “fell through gaping hole in the safety net”—“too poor to survive catastrophic illness.”
Certainly the restraining societal and systemic forces of poverty, generations of poverty, were no match for the country’s driving forces, a small and under-financed army of doctors, nurses and equipment.
His solution was to train and support an undervalued set of resources, local and community health workers to “accompany patients through their treatment, delivering their treatment in their homes, addressing needs for food, housing, safe water, etc.
In other words, Paul Farmer put undervalued resources (health workers) systematically and at once through both a “time pathway,” that is, to follow patients through the course of a chronic illness and a “place pathway” -- peoples’ own homes.