“The face of a country's health system.”  
“The best investment for improved health.”  
“The unsung heroes of public health.”

These were just a few of the phrases used at a special event last week to describe those who struggle every day to meet the vast majority of health issues around the world: frontline health workers. The forum for these accolades was the launch of the new Frontline Health Worker Coalition on January 11 at the Kaiser Family Foundation Conference Center in Washington, DC. A standing-room-only crowd listened to a panel discussion and learned more about the new initiative.

As a first step, the Coalition aims to spark new commitment from the US Government to support ways to add at least 250,000 new frontline health workers in lower-resourced countries by 2015. While this may seem like a large number, it's only a quarter of the estimated 1,000,000 new frontline health workers that the World Health Organization (WHO) has identified as being needed immediately. The meeting included founding members of the coalition as well as others such as the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Communication Programs and its Knowledge for Health (K4Health) Project. Both CCP and K4Health work to provide community health workers with the tools and information they need to serve their clients.

The panel discussion provided interesting and varied perspectives. Facilitated by former White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, the panel included USAID’s Assistant Administrator for Global Health, Dr. Ariel Pablos-Méndez; former Chief of Staff to First Lady Laura Bush, Anita McBride; Dr. Peter Ngatia, Director of Capacity Building for AMREF; and Duncan Learmouth, Senior VP for Developing Countries and Market Access for GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).. While their perspectives were diverse, the panelists all agreed that there is a clear and present need for more and better trained frontline health workers, and that hiring and training more community-level workers is the most cost effective way to save lives, speed progress on global health threats, and promote US economic and strategic interests.

At K4Health, we produce tools, technology, and synthesized information to provide frontline health workers with the right information at the right time in the right format to improve their ability to serve their clients. This means, for example, developing and supporting appropriate technology tools such as Web-based toolkits, eLearning courses, and mHealth applications; distributing hundreds of thousands of copies of Family Planning: A Global Handbook for Providers; and working on the ground with Ministries of Health to build the capacity of their frontline health workers. That is why last’s week’s launch of the new Frontline Health Workers Coalition was such welcome news.

We look forward to following the progress of this Coalition and contributing however we can. To learn more about the Frontline Health Workers Coalition and how you can participate, visit their website at http://frontlinehealthworkers.org/.