Partners are the key for Partners In Health

The work of Partners In Health is uniquely situated within "Four Pillars" of institutional support at our headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts. PIH's work as a nonprofit focusing on delivery of quality health care in poor communities benefits from longstanding ties to Harvard Medical School and one of its teaching hospitals, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, as well as a more recent affiliation with the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health. These alliances enable us to translate our lived experience serving the destitute sick into clinical and operational research, education and training paradigms, and programs and policies that reduce health disparities and improve treatment outcomes.

This collaboration among a non-profit organization, a world-renowned medical school, a major teaching hospital and a leading school of public health is a new and fruitful model for leveraging the resources of the world’s leading institutions to inspire, enlist, and train others to address the pressing health inequalities of our times. Working alongside local staff from our sister organizations at each of our project sites, clinicians and researchers from across the “Four Pillars” provide care to patients and train colleagues and junior staff. They also conduct cross-disciplinary, biosocial research on AIDS, tuberculosis and other diseases of the poor and advocate on behalf of those they serve.

Partners In Health

• Non-profit organization, founded in 1987.
• Executive and program staff advance the PIH mission to provide a preferential option for the poor in health care.
• Focus on patient care, program administration, drug procurement, technical assistance, and fundraising.

Program in Infectious Disease and Social Change
Department of Global Health and Social Medicine,
Harvard Medical School

• Academic program, launched in 1997.
• Investigators trained in anthropology, epidemiology, and public health.
• Faculty publish in the scholarly literature, participate in academic conferences, lead social medicine courses, and serve as mentors to students in medicine, public health, anthropology, epidemiology, and other related disciplines.

Division of Global Health Equity
Brigham and Women’s Hospital

• Harvard Medical School teaching hospital division, launched in 2001.
• Physician-scientists specializing in infectious diseases, pediatrics, cardiology, and informatics.
• Residency in Global Health Equity: internal medicine residents divide their time between the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and PIH project sites. Elements of this new approach to clinical training are now being replicated at other medical schools and teaching hospitals across the country.

François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights
Harvard School of Public Health

• The first academic center to focus exclusively on health and human rights.
• Expands knowledge through scholarship, professional training and public education.
• Develops domestic and international policy focusing on the relationship between health and human rights in a global perspective.
• Mobilizes scholars, public health and human rights practitioners, public officials, donors and activists to embrace the goals of the health and human rights movement.