Ethiopia gears up for more major health reforms.

摘要

For more than 5 years, Ethiopia's Federal Ministry of Health has relentlessly followed a vision of supporting community-based health care. The idea was that the only way for one of the poorest countries in the world to improve health services would be to build an operation up from the communities, as opposed to focusing on the top tier of health care-improving major hospitals-and building down. That gave birth to the hiring, training, and the deployment of more than 30000 health extension workers, almost all women, most of them high-school graduates with 1 year of training, to work in pairs in villages all over this rural nation of 85 million people. Success soon followed. The number of women dying in childbirth decreased. The number of children immunised increased. And the number of families gaining access to clean water soared. Ethiopia had created a model to improve primary health care for others to follow. Mission accomplished? Not even close.