History

June 2011, Global Positioning and Harmonization Conference of the People that Deliver Initiative, Geneva, Switzerland.

Background

The People that Deliver Initiative began as a workstream of the Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition. The RHSC is a global partnership of public, private, and non-governmental organizations dedicated to ensuring that all people in low- and middle-income countries can access and use affordable, high-quality supplies to ensure better reproductive health. In September of 2008, members of the RHSC determined that the low status and lack of relevant competencies in the health supply chain workforce contributed significantly to the often weak performance of country health supply chains in low- and middle-income countries. In December of 2009, the RHSC published a white paper that outlined the goals, approaches, and expected activities of the workstream. The white paper suggested that this issue was not limited to reproductive health, but was common to all health programs. The RHSC recognized that advocacy to change policies and practices for the health supply chain workforce would be more successful if implemented through a coordinated approach, cutting across health programs and organizations. The RHSC decided to proactively engage organizations working in various programmatic areas and health systems to collaborate in this effort.

In May 2010, the RHSC workstream embarked on a consultation process to engage other stakeholder organizations. Between May 2010 and February 2011, workstream members consulted with dozens of stakeholder organizations, inviting those organizations to join in a collaborative initiative and reflecting their inputs in the evolving goals, objectives, and approaches. The workstream developed into a global initiative including hundreds of participants from over 80 international and national health organizations – working on human resources issues, supply chain systems, pharmacy, essential medicines, HIV, tuberculosis, immunization, malaria, reproductive health, and other health programs. The initiative rebranded itself as “People that Deliver” in February 2011, to remove indications of a vertical program and to emphasize the focus on the human resources that make access to medicines and health supplies possible.

The stakeholder consultations emphasized two priorities to guide the Initiative: rapidly engaging with country governments and developing a stronger evidence base on human resources for supply chain management. The Initiative has identified seven diverse focus countries, and has engaged with several additional countries, to jointly shape the Initiative and its activities (additional information on country engagement below). The Initiative also embarked on a research agenda to document existing knowledge on human resources for supply chain management, by commissioning review papers, and to generate new evidence, through country assessments and global surveys of health supply chain workers.

Founding Conference

On June 28th and 29th, 2011, 170 representatives - from 13 country delegations and more than 75 organizations - assembled at the World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva for the Global Positioning and Harmonization Conference of the People that Deliver Initiative.

Building on the results of preliminary field research, country presentations, lessons from other fields, and broad-based discussion, participants agreed that there is need for a global initiative focused on human resources for supply chain management, committed to work together towards the common goal of sustainable workforce excellence for health supply chain management, described the specific contributions they would make, and provided consensus guidance on priority interventions and needed governance structures for the Initiative. Seventy-nine institutions agreed to the Conference Statement of Commitment to Action, pledging their support and action to achieve the shared goal of People that Deliver. The Conference marked a major transition for the Initiative - from building a coalition with a shared vision to implementing activities to achieve that vision.
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Commitment to Action

We pledge to support the achievement of the shared goal of the People that Deliver Initiative, which is for countries to improve health outcomes by developing sustainable excellence in the health workforce for managing supply chains and for overcoming existing and emerging health supply challenges. Sustainable workforce excellence is achieved when national institutions are able to develop, recruit, and retain supply chain personnel who ably respond to the supply needs at all levels of the health system.

To achieve this goal, we the participants at the People that Deliver Conference commit to take the following steps, as appropriate given the respective mandates, capacities and resources of our individual institutions:

Participate in a collaborative effort that seeks to coordinate and align partners in working towards sustainable excellence in the health workforce for managing supply chains;
Raise the awareness of governments and the international community, especially among high-level policy-makers, that supply chain management is a key strategic function of health systems, essential for meeting health goals, and that developing a strong and sustainable supply chain workforce should be a national priority, a global concern, and a shared responsibility;
Build understanding that supply chain management in health systems is highly complex and must satisfy specific regulations and requirements for health products, necessitating strong technical and managerial capacity for supply chain management within the health sector;
Improve the availability of, demand for, and retention of highly competent health supply chain workers, who ably respond to supply needs at all levels of the health system;
Leverage opportunities offered by human resource policies, systems and efforts at the national, regional and global levels to further this cause;
Encourage the development of global guidelines, tools, models and other resources that are relevant to all levels of the health system and adaptable to different country contexts, and which are based on existing evidence, previous work and agreement amongst Initiative partners;
Disseminate these global resources to partners and countries to support progress in developing workforce excellence in health supply chain management;
Identify priority actions with clear added value that will be undertaken by partner institutions, based on respective comparative advantages, to support countries, according to their needs and priorities, as they strive to attain workforce excellence in health supply chain management; and
Monitor and evaluate progress to demonstrate the impact and value of interventions promoted by the Initiative, as well as of the Initiative itself.