Advancing Health and Creating Lasting Impact: MacKenzie Scott’s Grants to Health Foundations
In 2019, MacKenzie Scott announced that she was stepping into the world of philanthropy to give away her multi-billion-dollar fortune “until the safe is empty”. She has kept her word—to date, she has given away $16.5 billion. Her initial process for choosing which organizations would receive grants was shrouded in mystery. From 2019 to 2023, Scott used a process she termed “quiet research” to identify possible grantee organizations. The lucky organizations received a call from Scott’s consultants, who let them know they were receiving a grant for immediate use however they would like to spend it. In the Fall of 2022, Grantmakers In Health (GIH) became one of those grantee organizations, along with more than 20 health foundations. Two additional GIH Funding Partner organizations received gifts in 2020 and 2021, respectively.
Advancing Quality Through Patient Safety
The Institute of Medicine estimates that between 44,000 and 98,000 lives are lost annually as a result of preventable medical errors. This Issue Brief examines the response to the medical errors crisis across the health care delivery system, as well as how grantmakers working at the national, state, and local levels can contribute to advancing quality through reductions in medical errors and improvements in patient safety.
Filling the Gap: Strategies for Improving Oral Health
This GIH Issue Focus outlines factors affecting oral health, and provides suggestions on what health funders can do.
Progress and Peril: Examining Antibiotic Resistance and Systemic Contaminants
This Issue Brief, based on an October 2000 Issue Dialogue, explores issues at the intersection of environment and health. It begins with a discussion of the increase in antibiotic resistance, likely factors that have contributed to this increase, and action by the public sector to limit this phenomenon. The report also provides an introduction to systemic contaminants, illustrating both their complexities and intervention strategies through case studies of well-known contaminants. Current grantmaker activities to address these issues are presented, as well as opportunities for future activities that cut across both of these broad issues.
Clearing the Air: Addressing Asthma in America
This GIH Issue Focus explores foundation efforts to address rising asthma in their communities.
Raising the Value of Philanthropy
This report, based on a series of interviews with leaders in health philanthropy, focuses on the characteristics of foundation programs and assessment strategies that appear to be most effective. It considers some of the seminal challenges facing the field and offers insights on operational structures and styles.
Long-Term Care Quality: Facing the Challenges of an Aging Population
For all the sophistication of our health care system, the United States does not have a highly developed and supportive long-term care network that takes good care of its elderly. This Issue Brief offers an overview of the primary factors influencing the quality of long-term care services – including demographics, service providers, financing, and policy and regulation – and profiles innovative grantmaker programs.
Advancing Quality through Improved Patient Safety
Despite the most sophisticated medical care in the world, each year more Americans die at the hands of our health care system than from some of life’s deadliest diseases. This Issue Focus presents information on what medical errors are, how they occur, and what strategies grantmakers can adopt to prevent them.
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