Paul Farmer: Partnering With The Poor

Dr. Paul Farmer

Medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer is Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Social Medicine in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where he is also Chair, and a founding director of Partners In Health, an international non-profit organization that provides direct health care services and undertakes research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty.

Dr. Farmer’s work draws primarily on active clinical practice and focuses on community-based treatment strategies for infectious diseases in resource-poor settings, health and human rights, and the role of social inequalities in determining disease distribution and outcomes. He is Chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) in Boston, and served for ten years as medical director of a charity hospital, L’Hôpital Bon Sauveur, in rural Haiti. Along with his colleagues at BWH, in the Program in Infectious Disease and Social Change at HMS, and in Haiti, Peru, Russia, Rwanda, Lesotho, and Malawi, Dr. Farmer has pioneered novel, community-based treatment strategies for AIDS and tuberculosis (including multidrug-resistant tuberculosis).

Dr. Farmer and his colleagues have successfully challenged the policymakers and critics who claim that quality health care is impossible to deliver in resource-poor settings.