Should the United States deploy a global health service corps to meet the urgent need for health workers overseas? According to IntraHealth International’s senior leadership, no. Earlier this week, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a letter from Pape Gaye, Kate Tulenko, and Maurice Middleberg called, “Increasing the Global Health Workforce,” in which they critique such a plan, which was proposed in the article, “Health Systems Strengthening Mechanism for the Global Health Initiative.”

Gaye, Tulenko, and Middleberg instead propose that investments in developing countries should support the scale-up of health worker production, retention, and support. As an example, they highlight IntraHealth’s work on the global CapacityPlus project to develop sustainable, cost-effective ways to produce more health workers and improve their efficiency and productivity and that of health professional schools through the US government’s Nurse Education Partnership Initiative. The authors argue for the importance of cost-effective assistance that builds local capacity and can encourage technical cooperation and collaboration between country institutions over the use of transient, costly, imported health professionals, especially when the United States employs thousands of health workers from other countries every year.

CapacityPlus is led by IntraHealth International and funded by USAID.