Last Mile Health

Context

• 50% of the world’s 7.3 billion people lack access to essential health services
• Of those, one billion live in rural communities, where the gaps are most alarming (e.g. infant mortality rates up to 21% higher)
• Compounding this crisis is a massive shortage of healthcare workers (18 million by 2030)

Solution

• Investing in community health workers (CHWs), alongside more nurses and doctors, can help close this gap.
• The Office of the UN Secretary General’s Envoy for Health Finance and for Malaria found a 10:1 ROI from investing in CHWs through increased productivity, reduced risk of epidemics, economic impact of increased employment
• Last Mile Health (LMH) is an NGO working in Liberia with a mission to put a high-performing CHW in every remote community
• LMH recruits and pays village-based healthcare workers that are medically equipped and supervised so that they can effectively perform home-based care, saving people from the most common, preventable causes of death
• Drawing attention from the Government of Liberia for the impact of its work, LMH advised the government in launching the National Community Health Assistant Program (NCHAP), an effort to scale the CHW model nation-wide
• LMH also started the Community Health Academy, which partners with ministries of health to strengthen the clinical skills of CHWs and the capacity of health systems leaders in order to build higher quality community health systems worldwide

Impact depth

By 2021, LMH alongside the Liberian Ministry of Health institutionalized the National Community Health Assistant Program (NCHAP), providing education and economic empowerment to 4,000 CHWs extending care to 1.2 million people living in the country’s most remote communities.

LMH contributes to:

• Improved access to quality primary health care: The most vulnerable members of society, namely pregnant women, young mothers and children living in remote communities, benefit from increased uptake of maternal and child health services and improved continuity of care for life-threating conditions such as Malaria, malnutrition, diarrhea and others
• Income generation and upskilling: CHWs are employed by LMH, receive professional training and earn USD70 per month