Towards an equitable internship programme at WHO: is reform nigh?

Correspondence to Dr Ashton Barnett-Vanes; ashton.barnett-vanes11@ alumni.imperial.ac.uk The global health workforce is under immense strain. For example, Africa—a continent with one-third of the world’s disease burden has only ∼3% of global health personnel. This year WHO launched its Global Strategy on Human Resources for Health (GSHRH)—calling for a redoubling of efforts to better train and equip the global health workforce in order to strengthen public health capacity; echoing the 2006 World Health Assembly (WHA) resolution ‘Rapid scaling up of health workforce production’ passed in 2006. In pursuit of these aims, WHO runs a range of external programmes to train public health professionals, including the WHO Fellowship Programme; and through partnership with over 700 collaborating centres— often at universities—in more than 80 countries. In addition to these external programmes, WHO also runs what should be an internal training programme for future public health leaders: the WHO internship programme. Now in its 50th year, the programme has recently come under increased scrutiny—catalysed by research published in 2014 that suggested it was inaccessible to young professionals from developing countries. With both civil society and Member States recognising the potentially corrosive impact of a high-profile internal training programme that contradicts core global health policy; the debate surrounding the programme has intersected the wider issue of developing country engagement in international health training opportunities and governance. This commentary presents an overview of the challenges and progress towards making WHO’s internship programme equitable.