Expert Consultation: How Can Training of Health Care Providers Be Effectively Used to Promote Human Rights in Patient Care?

The Law and Health Initiative of the Open Society Public Health Program organized an expert consultation in Budapest, Hungary to discuss how training health providers can help promote human rights in patient care. Participants included program officers and law and health coordinators from the Open Society foundations in Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine, East Africa, and southern Africa, as well as leading human rights trainers and advocates from these countries. The goal of the meeting was to consider how best to encourage in-country transformations of the culture of health care to reduce bias and discrimination, increase privacy and confidentiality, ensure patient consent, and move toward more patient-centered forms of care.

During the meeting, participants identified good practices for ensuring that human rights trainings actually change health providers’ behavior and practice; shared successful models for training health providers (including skills building and knowledge development); developed and applied a framework for evaluating funding proposals for human rights trainings for health providers; and practiced designing a human rights training initiative.

A list of dos and don’ts and ten principles for training health providers on human rights, as well as a meeting report from the expert consultation, are available for download.