Building Rights-Based Health Systems: A Focus on the Health Workforce

A boy suffering from rheumatic heart disease goes into cardiac arrest in Medical Ward 4C in Mulago Hospital, the national referral hospital in Kampala, Uganda. He apparently never received the antibiotics that could have prevented him from reaching this desperate moment. His family is poor, so he has ended up in this ward, devoid of equipment save the occasional IV line. He is not hooked up to a heart monitor. Nurses try to save him; they call doctors, but none come; there are too few. The nurses’ heroic efforts are not enough. The fourteen-year-old is dead. It is but another typically traumatic day in a crippled health system.

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