Respect & Recognition

The launch of a new alliance and national policy in Kenya will create an enabling environment for nurses and midwives to deliver health services and grow and succeed through the profession.

These midwives are helping to elevate the professional midwifery workforce in Mexico and Colombia while working to improve the lives of women and children in Indigenous communities.

Medical PPE across all areas is designed with a default male body in mind. When a majority of health workers are women, if the PPE doesn’t fit women, it doesn’t fit health workers.

The Center’s Respect & Recognition work is designed to give health workers the tools and agency to advocate for themselves and make meaningful changes by building alliances, spotlighting frontline voices and working with governments across the world.

Johnson & Johnson partnered with the Lorna Breen Heroes’ Foundation to advance the Dr. Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Act (H.R. 1667), the first ever federal legislation directed at protecting the mental health of our nation's health workforce by ending the culture of fear among healthcare professionals who seek mental health support and treatment.

Those closest to health challenges must play a central role in solutions. Building resilient, equitable health systems will require that frontline expertise and leadership are adequately valued by decision-makers.

The health status of Black women in the U.S. is shockingly similar to women in Liberia. Empowering community health workers may be the solution to tackling gender inequity and structural racism, and improving health outcomes in both countries.

Women form 70% of the global health workforce fighting on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, yet women's expertise and perspectives are woefully underrepresented in decision-making spaces including on national task forces and WHO’s COVID-19 emergency response committee. To foster dialogue on how gender inequity is impacting the global response to COVID-19, Johnson & Johnson Foundation partnered with Women in Global Health (WGH) last year on a digital COVID 50/50 Action Labs series. Each Action Lab, produced in collaboration with the Johnson & Johnson Center for Health Worker Innovation, addressed one of the WGH Five Asks through interactive panel discussions showcasing the voices of those central to the response to COVID-19 and were designed to drive local advocacy.

Frontline health workers, including nurses, midwives and community health workers (CHWs), are vital for effective, strong primary healthcare systems that deliver for everyone, everywhere. These cadres of health workers are the first, and in some cases often the only, point of contact with the health system for millions of people. Through the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, nurses stepped up to lead not only at testing sites but in critical care of very ill patients, and community health workers played key roles in contact tracing and testing in many countries around the world.

The COVID-19 pandemic has cast new light on the essential and selfless role health workers play in providing care that has saved lives and reduced suffering. Yet it has equally revealed the challenges in maintaining well-functioning health systems as well as exacerbated the deep inequities and gaps in access to healthcare for those most vulnerable that we always knew existed, but as a society have failed to address.