Raj Panjabi

Panjabi is best known as the co-founder and CEO of Last Mile Health,[8] a non-profit organisation working to save lives in the world's most remote communities. He co-founded this organisation in 2007 with a small team of Liberian civil war survivors and American health workers and $6,000 he had received as a wedding gift.

Following the 2013-16 West Africa Ebola epidemic, Last Mile Health partnered with the Government of Liberia and other organizations to design and scale a National Community Health Assistant Program, which has trained and equipped thousands of community health workers, nurses, physician assistants, and midwives serving 80% of the rural population. The workers in this program carry out nearly 1/3 of all confirmed malaria diagnoses in the country, have identified over 4,000 potential epidemic events, improved vaccination coverage, improved skill birth attendance, and increased the rate of children receiving medical care by over 50% in Liberia's most remote communities.[9] As of 2019, through service, research and advocacy efforts, Last Mile Health has supported local partners working to strengthen rural frontline and community health workforces in nearly 10 countries across three continents.[10]

In 2017, Panjabi and Last Mile Health received the $1 million TED Prize to launch the Community Health Academy, a global platform leveraging the power of digital technology to support countries to modernize the training of community health workers and health systems leaders.[11] In collaboration with several partners and governments, the Community Health Academy has launched online and mobile courses for frontline health leaders and workers seeking to strengthen primary health care at the community level. The Academy's leadership and clinical courses have enrolled over 50,000 community health leaders, health workers and others from 197 countries.[12]

Panjabi is a Gavi Champion, member of the International Advisory Group for Frontlines First at the Global Financing Facility of the World Bank Group, advisor to the Community Health Roadmap, and a member of the Community Health Worker Hub at the World Health Organization [WHO], where he served on the External Review Group for the WHO's guidelines on health policy and system support to optimize community health worker programs.

Panjabi has served on the boards of Echoing Green,[13] the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Center for Women and Development[14] and Doctors for America.[15]

Panjabi has authored or co-authored over 50 publications.[16] He has chaired a global study investigating lessons learned from exemplar community-based health care programs. His and Last Mile Health's work on community and rural health care delivery has been published in The Lancet,[17] the Journal of the American Medical Association,[18] PLoS Medicine,[19] the Bulletin of the World Health Organization,[20] and the Journal of Global Health.[21]

In 2017, a study on Last Mile Health's work with the Liberian health ministry, "Implementation research on community health workers' provision of maternal and child health services in rural Liberia", was published in a special theme issue of the Bulletin of the World Health Organization focused on universal health coverage and vulnerable populations.[22] The authors of the study included Panjabi as well as researchers from the Liberian health ministry, the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College, and Harvard University. The study indicated that, in one of Liberia's most remote districts, professionalized CHWs coached by nurses significantly improved access to care from qualified providers for children suffering from diarrhea, malaria, and acute respiratory infection – increasing by 60.1, 30.6 and 51.2 percentage points, respectively. Furthermore, CHWs significantly increased the rates of pregnant women undergoing clinic-based births with a skilled provider to 84.0 percent. In addition, despite the Ebola virus disease outbreak, which caused substantial declines in health-care utilization in other regions of the country, the study showed increases in health-care use from formal providers for fever, acute respiratory infection, and diarrhea among children and facility-based delivery among pregnant women. The study noted:

practices from this programme are being scaled up to over 240 remote communities in adjacent Rivercess County. Furthermore, several of the programme's features, such as contracts and cash payments, ensuring a CHW-to-population ratio of 1:350, targeting of services to remote communities and field-based supervision, have helped to inform the design of Liberia's National Community Health Assistant Program.[22]

An editorial on barriers to universal health coverage co-authored by Margaret Chan, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, cited the 2017 study about Last Mile Health's work in Liberia. This editorial stated: "Enhanced recruitment, training, supervision, and compensation of community health workers rapidly improved coverage with maternal and child health services in rural areas of Liberia."[23] Multiple additional studies have documented improvements in coverage, access and quality of primary health care amongst rural families.[24]

Panjabi was a co-author of the report Strengthening Primary Health Care through Community Health Workers: Investment Case and Financing Recommendations. The report found that extending the reach of the primary health care system by investing in CHW programs can deliver a high economic return—up to 10:1—and calls on government leaders, international financiers, donors, and the global health community broadly to take specific actions to support the financing and scale up of CHW programs across sub-Saharan Africa.[25]

In 2017, Panjabi delivered a TED Talk entitled, "No One Should Die Because They Live Too Far From a Doctor."[11] Panjabi's TED Talk has been viewed over one million times and was selected as a Top 10 TED Talk of 2017, alongside TED Talks from Pope Francis and Elon Musk.[26] He gave additional TED talks in 2018 and 2019 on the power of investing in community and frontline health workers.[27][28] Panjabi spoke on a panel hosted by The Elders in celebration of Nelson Mandela's 100th birthday in South Africa, with Former Irish President, Mary Robinson, and Former Liberian President, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.[29] Panjabi spoke at the TIME 100 Health Summit on Closing the Healthcare Gap.[30] Panjabi highlighted the role of investing in rural community health workers at the TIME-Fortune Global Forum hosted by Pope Francis in 2016.[31]

Panjabi delivered testimony at the US Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health Policy session, "A Progress Report of the West Africa Ebola Epidemic", arguing investments in rural community health workers can help make health systems responsive to Ebola and future epidemics.[32]

Panjabi delivered the commencement address at the graduation of Harvard Medical School in 2015, titled "The Power of Selfless Acts".[33] He has delivered medical grand rounds at Harvard-teaching hospitals including Boston Children's Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Brigham & Women's Hospital, and gave a keynote address at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement's 2019 National Forum.[34]