Where They Need Me: Local Clinicians and the Workings of Global Health in Haiti

Where They Need Me examines the work of Haitian health professionals in humanitarian aid encounters, highlighting the divergent criteria used to evaluate interventions' efficacy and the importance of considering local health care providers in the context of global health to counter simplistic depictions of clinicians and patients.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 192 pages
Publication date: 05 August 2022
Publisher: Cornell University Press

Where They Need Me examines the work of Haitian health professionals in humanitarian aid encounters. Haiti is the target of an overwhelming number of internationally funded health projects, with religious institutions sponsoring many of these initiatives. Pierre Minn illustrates the divergent criteria that actors involved in global health use to evaluate interventions' efficacy. Haitian physicians, nurses, and administrative staff are hired to carry out these global health programs, distribute or withhold resources, and produce accounts of interventions' outcomes. In their roles as intermediaries, Haitian clinicians are expected not only to embody the humanitarian projects of foreign funders and care for their impoverished patients but also to act as sources of support for their own kin networks while negotiating their future prospects in a climate of pronounced scarcity and insecurity. Minn argues that a serious consideration of these local health care providers in the context of global health is essential to counter simplistic depictions of clinicians and patients as heroes, villains, or victims and to move beyond the donor-recipient dyad that has dominated theoretical work on humanitarianism and the gift.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781501763854