Dr Vanessa Kerry has been appointed Special Envoy for Health Resilience at the World Health Organization.
Joël Saget/AFP via Getty Images
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Joël Saget/AFP via Getty Images
Resilience is one of those buzzwords. But what exactly does this mean? Recovering from tragedy? Overcoming obstacles? Do you have the inner strength to pursue a dream when the odds are against you?
For Dr Vanessa Kerry, the definition is quite simple. It comes down to being prepared. In the world of global health, she says, that means “robust systems, primary care and the capacity to respond.”
These are the ideas that will guide her in her new role as special envoy for health resilience at the World Health Organization.
It’s the latest addition to an impressive CV. Kerry was the WHO’s first special envoy for climate change and health, is director of global health and climate policy in the Department of Environmental Health at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, and is the founder and CEO of Seed Global Health. This nonprofit group has been building resilience in low-resource countries for more than a decade, sending coaches and mentors to educate and train local healthcare students and practitioners, as well as creating financial and material resources.
Kerry’s activism reflects the defining moments of his younger years. In elementary school, she decided she wanted to become a doctor. At age 14, she traveled to Vietnam with her father, former senator and Secretary of State John Kerry, and was deeply struck by the poverty she saw.
High risk delivery
Then came the crisis in Rwanda.
Between her third and fourth years of medicine, she spent time in a hospital in Rwanda. One day, he was asked to “lend a hand” during a woman’s labor and delivery, working with a nurse.
Kerry said, “I’m a student.” So here’s the team: this American medical student and a Rwandan nurse.
“The mother was pushing, but the baby wasn’t moving forward,” Kerry remembers. “The shoulder had gotten stuck so we had to do the necessary maneuvers to help deliver.” She tried to remember everything she could about her time in a “work rotation a while ago.” There was no imaging, no specific training neither she nor the nurse had had for this type of situation.
“We were lucky,” she says, “because what we remembered worked.” Both mother and child survived.
Kerry, now 49, recalls: “I remember walking out of that room thinking it was extremely distressing – even more so, extremely shocking and terrifying.
She could only conclude that “this whole system is not working.”
This heartbreaking birth was the seed of Seed Global Health. She knew that many of her colleagues wanted to work to improve global health. But most opportunities involved flying to do some procedures and then flying home.
“They contributed then, but what next?”
When she returned to Boston from Rwanda to complete her residency at Massachusetts General, she began to develop the idea of working with the Peace Corps to send doctors and nurses to sub-Saharan Africa as medical educators to train health care workers who could then train others — thereby building a country’s internal health system. Seed’s collaboration with the Peace Corps lasted from 2012 to 2018, focusing on developing country-led efforts to control the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Today, Seed is active in several sub-Saharan African countries for its training efforts. In Uganda, for example, Kerry says his group partnered with the Ministry of Health to expand emergency medicine by training 30 emergency doctors. When an Ebola outbreak occurred in this country earlier this year, she says these emergency doctors and other specialists were able to train more than 3,000 health workers across the country in Ebola case management and infection prevention and control.
Seed, she says, taught her that building resilience “is not a daunting task. If you train health workers, they can monitor and provide health care, they can provide surveillance, they can provide prevention.”
Building responsive health systems is the goal of her new work, she says. “We fund disease by disease and crisis by crisis. We can think about things differently.”
Its goal is not simply to intervene when a new epidemic occurs. “If a country does not have a health system infrastructure, it will probably not be ready to respond to the emergency. Resilience means building a system that will already be in place.”
And that also means listening to local voices. “Countries know what their priorities are for taking care of their people,” she says. As resilience envoy, she wants to ensure there is sufficient funding to “tackle the biggest burdens of disease more effectively.”
Diane Cole writes for numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal And The Washington Post. She is the author of the memoir After great pain: a new life emerges. Its website is DianeJoyceCole.com
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