Serving the world’s hardest to reach
Frontline health care at UBS Optimus Foundation
Meet Integrate Health, a UBS Optimus Foundation partner in Togo
Meet Integrate Health, a UBS Optimus Foundation partner in Togo
Community health workers and primary health care facilities are central to ensuring the most vulnerable get care – both go hand in hand.
Integrate Health saves lives in the world’s most neglected communities by integrating professional community health workers with improved care in public clinics. This powerful combination transforms the poorest-performing government clinics into lifesaving centers of excellence. Integrate Health currently serves close to 100,000 people through several health centers across Togo. Over three years, they've observed a 50 percent reduction in child mortality in the pilot communities where Integrate Health works. Building on this success, Integrate Health is expanding to serve more people and scale the model nationally.
The problem you'll help to address
The problem you'll help to address
The lack of access to health care services has far reaching consequences.
Half of the world’s 7.3 billion people lack access to essential health services.1
303,000 women worldwide died due to maternal causes in 2015.2
5.4 million children under 5 died from preventable causes in 2017.3
2.5 million of these deaths were newborns in their first month of life.4
An additional 1 million children aged 5–14 died from preventable causes.5
75% neonatal deaths due to prematurity, intrapartum-related events or neonatal sepsis.6
Acute respiratory infections, diarrhea, and malaria are the leading causes of death among children aged 1–59 months.7
Undernutrition is linked to 60% of all deaths of children under age 5.8
Bring a health worker within reach of everyone, everywhere. Impossible? Last Mile Health, our UBS Optimus Foundation partner, is on a mission to reach the most remote communities.
In Liberia, a front line of the Ebola-outbreak, people's chances of getting lifesaving or preventive life care decrease based on the distance they live from a care facility. If you're a two year old, and you come down with a fever, your mom would have to put you on her back get to the river bed, get in a canoe, paddle across the other side and walk for up to two days just to get a diagnosis in a clinic.
Children still die at 20 times greater rates in remote and underserved countries such as Liberia than in Switzerland, the UK, the US or Hong Kong. Last Mile Health, since 2013, is on a mission to change this by ensuring that well-trained community health workers reach even the most remote communities.
Watch the video to experience life in remote Liberia.
Underlying causes of child and maternal deaths
Underlying causes of child and maternal deaths
Geographic distance
Financial
Human resources
Infrastructure
Gender norms
Meet Doris, a community health worker at Last Mile Health, one of our UBS Optimus Foundation partner
Strong frontline healthcare:
- Is associated with longer life expectancy and lower infant and under-five mortality
- Can meet 80 percent of all health needs
- Supports equitable distribution of health
- Serves as an early warning mechanism to detect and respond to disease outbreaks
- Is key to addressing the growing burden of non-communicable diseases in developing countries
We can help you maximize your philanthropy in the area of frontline health care by focusing on three strategic areas.
We can help you maximize your philanthropy in the area of frontline health care by focusing on three strategic areas.
Strategic focus areas | Method | Target output | |||
Expand community health workforce and improve primary health center quality |
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Increase efficiency and promote data-driven decision-making |
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Support innovative financing to improve delivery of health services |
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More effective together: Collaborating for improved community health
More effective together: Collaborating for improved community health
Living Goods supports official government health workers, empowering them as entrepreneurs by paying for performance from the retail margin on its health products, plus small impact-tied incentives. Because the business model recovers 100 percent of the cost of the products and generates margin to pay the health workers, the remaining yearly cost is less than USD 2 per person.
Living Goods and Last Mile Health, another UBS Optimus Foundation partner, both share a vision: to transform community health in the world’s hardest to reach places. By collaborating together, they aim to galvanize thousands of digitally empowered community health workers providing on-call home health care to over millions of people in Africa.
We talked to Chuck Slaughter the Founder of Living Goods about the importance of collaboration and mobile technology to transform community health on a game-changing scale. Here's what he had to say
Meet We Care Solar
Meet We Care Solar
Each year, over a quarter of a million mothers die of pregnancy-related complications and nearly one million babies die on the first day of their life, often in health centers without reliable electricity.
The Solar Suitcase is low cost and easy to use and captures the sun’s energy during the day to provide a reliable source of electricity at night in health clinics in poor rural areas. This powers lights and medical and communication equipment, transforming the chances of survival for mothers and babies.