Stories

Tag: inequity

  • From diagnosis to duty: health workers confront their own role in inequity

    From diagnosis to duty: health workers confront their own role in inequity

    A thirteen-year-old girl in Nigeria, bitten by a snake, arrived at a hospital with her frantic family. The hospital demanded payment before administering the antivenom. The family could not afford it. The girl died.

    This was one of the stark stories shared by health professionals on September 10, 2025, during “Exploration Day,” the third day of The Geneva Learning Foundation’s inaugural peer learning exercise on health equity. The previous day had been about diagnosing the external systems that create such tragedies. But today, the focus shifted.

    “Yesterday, we looked at the problem,” said TGLF facilitator Dr María Fernanda Monzón. “Today, we look in the mirror. We move from analyzing the situation to analyzing ourselves, our own role, our own power, and our own assumptions”.

    The practitioner’s role

    The day’s intensive, small-group workshops challenged participants to move beyond naming a problem to questioning their own connection to it. Groups brought their findings back to the plenary, where the work of exploration continued.

    Oyelaja Olayide, a medical laboratory scientist from Nigeria, presented her group’s analysis of a child’s death following a lab misdiagnosis. The group’s root cause analysis pointed to a systemic issue: the lack of a quality management system in the laboratory. But then the facilitator turned the question back to her. “What was your role in this?”.

    The question hung in the air, shifting the focus from an abstract system to individual responsibility. This pivot is central to the learning process, and the cohort’s diversity is a core element of its design. The majority of participants are frontline health workers—nurses, midwives, doctors, and community health promoters. They work side-by-side as peers with national-level staff and international partners, with government employees making up over 40% of the group. This mix intentionally breaks down traditional hierarchies, creating a space where a policy-maker can learn directly from the lived experience of a clinician in a remote village.

    Learn more about the Certificate peer learning programme for equity in research and practice https://www.learning.foundation/bias

    After a moment of reflection, Olayide acknowledged her role as a professional with the expertise to see the gap. “My role is to be an advocate,” she concluded, recognizing her duty to push for the implementation of quality control systems that could prevent future tragedies.

    From reflection to a plan for action

    This deep self-reflection is the foundation for the next stage of the process: creating a viable action plan. For the remainder of the day, participants worked on the third part of their course project, which is due by the end of the week.

    The programme’s methodology insists that a good plan is not made for a community, but with a community. Participants were guided to develop action steps that involve listening to the people most affected and ensuring they help lead the change. This requires practitioners to think honestly about their position and power and how they can share it to empower others.

    The day’s exploration pushed participants beyond easy answers. It asked them to confront their own biases, acknowledge their power, and accept their professional duty not just to treat patients, but to help fix the broken systems that make them sick. By turning the analytical lens inward, they began to forge the tools they need to build a more equitable future.

    About the Certificate peer learning programme for equity in research and practice

    The Geneva Learning Foundation is an organization that helps health workers from around the world learn together as equals. It offers the Certificate peer learning programme for equity in research and practice, where health professionals work with each other to make health care more fair for everyone, both in how care is given and in how health is studied. The first course in this program is called EQUITY-001 Equity matters, which introduces a method called HEART. This method helps you turn your experience into a real plan for change. HEART stands for Human Equity, Action, Reflection, and Transformation. This means you will learn to see unfairness in health (Human Equity), create a practical plan to do something about it (Action), think carefully about the problem to find its root cause (Reflection), and make a lasting, positive change for your community (Transformation).

    Image: The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection © 2025

  • The practitioner as catalyst: How a global learning community is turning frontline experience into action on health inequity

    The practitioner as catalyst: How a global learning community is turning frontline experience into action on health inequity

    “In this phase of my life, I want to work directly with the communities to see what I can do,” said Dr. Sambo Godwin Ishaku, a public health leader from Nigeria with over two decades of experience. His words opened the second day of The Geneva Learning Foundation’s first-ever peer learning exercise on health equity. They also spoke to the very origin of the event itself.

    The Geneva Learning Foundation’s Certificate peer learning programme for equity in research and practice was created because thousands of health workers like Dr. Ishaku joined a global dialogue about equity and demanded a new kind of learning—one that moved beyond theory to provide practical tools for action.

    This inaugural session on 9 September 2025, called “Discovery Day,” was a direct answer to that call. It was not a lecture, but a three-hour, high-intensity workshop where the participants’ own experiences of inequity became the curriculum.

    The goal for the day was one step in a carefully designed 16-day process: to help practitioners see a familiar problem in a new way, setting the stage for them to build a viable action plan they can use in their communities.

    The anatomy of unfairness

    The session began with practitioners sharing true stories of systemic failure. These accounts gave a human pulse to the clinical definition of health inequity: the avoidable and unjust conditions that make it harder for some people to be healthy.

    To demonstrate how to move from story to analysis, the entire cohort engaged in a collective diagnosis. They focused on a first case presented by Dr. Elizabeth Oduwole, a retired physician, about a 65-year-old man unable to afford his diabetes medication on a meager pension. Together, in a live plenary, they used a simple analytical tool to excavate the root causes of this single injustice.

    The tool, known as the “Five Whys,” is less about power and more about simplicity. Its strength lies in its accessibility, providing a common language for a cohort of remarkable diversity. In this programme, community health workers, doctors, nurses, midwives, and others who work for health on the front lines of service delivery make up the majority of participants. They work side-by-side as peers with national-level staff and international partners. Government staff comprise over 40% of the group.

    The group’s collective intelligence peeled back the layers of Dr. Oduwole’s story. The man’s inability to afford medicine was not just about poverty (Why #1) , but about a lack of government policy for the elderly (Why #2). This, in turn, was linked to a lack of advocacy (Why #3) , which stemmed from biased social norms that devalue the lives of older adults (Why #4). The root cause they uncovered was a deep-seated cultural belief, passed down through generations, that this was simply the natural order of things (Why #5). In minutes, the problem had transformed from a financial issue into a profound cultural challenge.

    A crucible for discovery

    With this shared experience, the practitioners were plunged into a rapid series of timed, small-group workshops. In these intense breakout sessions, they applied the same methodology to situations each group identified.

    The stories that emerged were stark. One group analyzed the experience of a participant from Nigeria whose father died after being denied oxygen at a hospital because the only available tank was being reserved for a doctor’s mother. Their analysis traced this act back to a root cause of systemic decay and a breakdown in the ethics of the health profession. Another group tackled the insidious spread of health misinformation preventing rural girls in a conflict-afflicted area from receiving the HPV vaccine, identifying the root cause as an inadequate national health communication strategy.

    A learning community was born in these workshops. They became a crucible where practitioners, often isolated in their daily work, connect with peers who understand their struggles. By unpacking a real-world problem together, they practice the skills needed for their final course project: a practical action plan due at the end of the week, which they will then have peer-reviewed and revised.

    The process is designed to generate unexpected insights. Day 2, “Discovery,” is followed by Day 3, “Exploration,” both dedicated to this intensive peer analysis. By the end of the journey, each participant will have an action plan to tackle a local challenge, one that is often radically different from what they might have first envisioned, because it targets a newly discovered root cause.

    The session ended, as it began, with the voices of health workers. The chat filled with a sense of energy and purpose. “We are all eager to learn, to know more, and to make an equitable Africa,” wrote Vivian Abara, a pre-hospital emergency services responder . “We’re really, really ready to go the whole nine yards and do everything, help ourselves, hold each other’s hand and move.”

    About The Geneva Learning Foundation

    The Geneva Learning Foundation is an organization that helps health workers from around the world learn together as equals. It offers the Certificate peer learning programme for equity in research and practice, where health professionals work with each other to make health care more fair for everyone, both in how care is given and in how health is studied. The first course in this programme is called EQUITY-001 Equity matters, which introduces a method called HEART. This method helps you turn your experience into a real plan for change. HEART stands for Human Equity, Action, Reflection, and Transformation. This means you will learn to see inequity in health (Human Equity), create a practical plan to do something about it (Action), think carefully about the problem to find its root cause (Reflection), and make a lasting, positive change for your community (Transformation).

    Image: The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection © 2025