Washington, DC, May 9, 2017 – Dr. Debrework Zewdie, who earlier this year joined AIHA’s Board of Directors, recently traveled to her native country of Ethiopia where she met with our country team in Addis Ababa.
She also traveled to Debre Berhan Referral Hospital, which engaged in a PEPFAR-supported Twinning Center partnership with Elmhurst Hospital Center from 2007-2014, accompanied by AIHA Country Director, Kidest Hailu, and Program Coordinator, Saba Sintayehu.
There, she toured the hospital campus, met with staff, and learned first-hand how their partnership helped transform Debre Berhan into one of the country’s leading hospitals.
“I was so impressed,” Dr. Debrework said of her visit to Debre Berhan. “I must say, in my 35 years of development work I have never seen a cleaner or more well-run hospital in any of the developing countries I visited — and I have visited many. It is also a testament that with the right leadership one can do so much with very little.”
Thanks to that leadership, and the technical assistance provided by AIHA and their partners at Elmhurst, Debre Berhan has emerged as a national benchmark and been recognized as a top-performing hospital by Ethiopia’s Ministry of Health for the last three years in a row.
Dr. Debrework is currently Distinguished Scholar at the Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy of the City University of New York (CUNY) and Senior Leadership Fellow at Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her previous professional experience includes leadership positions at The World Bank, the Global Fund, and the Ethiopian Ministry of Health.
We’re thrilled to welcome her to the AIHA family!
Click here to learn more about AIHA’s Debre Berhan / Elmhurst partnership, which was funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Ethiopia through a cooperative agreement with the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.