Introducing GiveHealth: a giving Pledge for healthcare workers (and a call for volunteers)
What
GiveHealth is a new EA-inspired effective giving organisation. It is a community of healthcare professionals who have taken a public Pledge to donate at least 1% of their income to the most effective global health charities.
Visitors to the website can Learn about effective giving, their relative wealth on the global stage, how healthcare professionals can improve their impact, the activities of GiveWell and the highly effective nature of the charities recommended by GiveWell.
Healthcare professionals are invited to take a public Pledge to donate at least 1% of their income to GiveWell’s top charities for the rest of their lives. They can use the Pledge Calculator to determine their monthly/annual donations based on their salary and desired donation percentage. Once they have taken the Pledge their name, profession and location will be displayed on the GiveHealth Community Board, and they can learn about the Charities recommended by GiveWell and follow the links to the donation page of their chosen charities. Pledge takers will receive a survey on each anniversary of their Pledge to capture their donation activities over the previous year so GiveHealth can measure the value of donations it is influencing. Anybody can sign up to the GiveHealth monthly newsletter.
Healthcare professionals of all disciplines (nurses, physiotherapists, pharmacists, occupational therapists, doctors, etc) and kinds (clinicians, researchers, managers, policy-makers, students, retired professionals, etc) of any level of seniority, from any part of the world, are welcome to sign the GiveHealth Pledge.
Why
Healthcare professionals are a self-selected group of generally altruistic individuals who both care about improving the health of others and are motivated to do so. There is also a strong sense of community and camaraderie amongst healthcare professionals, while their awareness and understanding of EA and its principles is generally low.
Giving What We Can has shown the public Pledge model to be an effective vehicle for generating donations (by fostering commitment, community and culture), which GiveHealth has combined with a lower barrier to entry (at least 1% of income rather than 10%) that we feel is more appropriate for a group less familiar with EA. Pledge takers are still able to sign the Giving What We Can pledge, and their GiveHealth pledge can be included within, rather than in addition to, their GWWC pledge (since both pledges commit the individual to donating to effective charities) – for example, donating 10% of income can satisfy both a 10% GiveHealth Pledge and the 10% GWWC pledge.
We hope the existing strong sense of community between healthcare professionals, and the 1% low barrier to entry, can be harnessed to generate Pledge-taking momentum amongst these professionals, while increasing their awareness and understanding of EA. In this manner, GiveHealth could be regarded as the healthcare profession analogue of High Impact Athletes and Raising for Effective Giving, which are EA-inspired communities of effective giving relevant to specific professions (elite athletes and professional poker players, respectively).
Where
Healthcare professionals from anywhere in the world are welcome and encouraged to take the GiveHealth Pledge.
Who
The Co-Founders of GiveHealth are three UK-trained doctors – Richard Armitage (GP in UK), Alastair Yeoh (infectious diseases doctor in UK) and George Altman (intern in Australia).
How
GiveHealth is currently run on an entirely voluntary basis by the three Co-Founders alongside their full-time work as frontline healthcare professionals. No funds were raised from external sources. The Co-Founders used their own funds to build and maintain the GiveHealth website. Supporters can donate funds directly to the project (to cover website maintenance fees, administrative costs, etc) via the Support page.
Our ask
If you’re a healthcare professional of any discipline – practicing, studying or retired – anywhere in the world, then please consider taking the GiveHealth Pledge. Please also tell the healthcare professionals in your network about GiveHealth and direct them to the website.
Call for healthcare volunteers
We are also looking for volunteers to help the organisation grow. We would like to recruit Leads for each country and each healthcare profession. The main task for Leads will be to promote GiveHealth in their designated country and healthcare profession and to recruit Pledge-takers. Work can be carried out on a flexible basis and will require less than 3 hours per week. If you’re interested in volunteering or would like to learn more about these roles, please email us on info@give-health.org.
I like the general idea, but a bit of feedback:
I’m not super compelled by the arguments for only asking people to donate 1%, which strikes me as a trivial amount of money, especially in the context of (1) doctors’ and other healthcare workers’ salaries (in the US, physicians make $350k on average) and (2) the fact that 2⁄3 of the US population gives an average of 4% per year (I dunno how reliable this stat is, or how this rate compares to other countries, but I’m inclined to think that the 1⁄3 who don’t give will not respond to this initiative).
I understand not wanting to make the perfect the enemy of the good here, but I think the biggest risk of only asking people to donate 1% is inadvertently normalizing 1% as being a reasonable amount for healthcare workers to donate (I am still a trainee, and I comfortably donate way more than this! I also am a bit reticent to take the pledge myself, because I don’t want people to think that I only donate 1%/endorse donating 1%).
I think it makes most sense to target the healthcare workers who already donate some (and who on average likely donate >1% already), and I suspect the best thing to do would be to focus on (1) getting them to pledge a more significant amount than they’re already donating (5%?), (2) specifically encouraging them to give to charities that are supported by a lot of evidence (e.g., GiveWell’s Top Charities fund, rather than GiveWell’s All Grants Fund), and (3) focusing on health-oriented interventions (which most of GiveWell’s are already, but this would be good to highlight explicitly).
+1 I think it’s worth trying to push for a 10% pledge and see what kind of traction you get. Also curious if you’ve spoken to OFTW about their experience with the 1% pledge and churn rates etc.
Doctors in the UK (like the ones that set this up) earn way less that $350k a year in general. Junior doctors (which are the majority of the UK doctor workforce) are very poorly paid, I think many of my friends made something like £14/hour for the first few years after qualifying.
I earn about $15/hour and donate much more than 1%. I don’t think it’s that hard to do this, and it seems weird to set such a low bar.
This is also generally true of US trainees (residents and fellows). For the non-US people, there’s 4 years of undergrad, 4 years of medical school, generally 3-5 years of residency, then an optional 1-3? years of fellowship for certain specialties.
On the other hand, I think Lilly is correct insofar as 1 percent would be a pretty meager ask for most US attendings, even in lower-paying specialties.
According to the first result in Google, doctors’ total pay, while significantly lower than the UK, is still significantly above the UK average, even for junior doctors. Their hourly rate is surprisingly low but that’s mainly because they work very long hours.
“Healthcare workers” includes nurses, and can encompass care workers and semi-skilled hospital workers on not much more than minimum wage, and I guess the figure may have been chosen to take into account that many of them may consider the nature of the work they do to be pretty altruistic already...
I do wonder whether a non-specific giving pledge is better than a low percentage though?
Thanks for all the considered comments. Some of these are definitely questions that we wrestled with and we are open to adapt and change if we feel that’s right.
This is out core promotional video so please have a look and circulate
1% vs. 5% vs. 10%:
This is a very challenging but important question and everyone is likely to respond differently to this depending on their specific perspective. For hardcore EA people (probably anyone reading this post) it may seem very low. - N.B. The Pledge is at least 1% and in the promotional content we highlight the additive benefits of donating more.
We also will aim to reconsult our member base to invite them to review their Pledge and increase it over the years
10% I have found anecdotally to be a real turn-off for people. In the UK right now there are ongoing strikes regarding doctor’s pay which I think have a good basis, but people do not “feel” like they have surplus.
5% is a feasible alternative, but we wanted to reach out to this most unfamiliar with EA, for whom I think even 5% seems a lot in current culture.
The risk of people fulfilling their moral obligation with a lower amount is a real issue to consider, but hard to balance against other pros of a lower buy-in/threshold to click/read on
Outcomes of the Pledge
We hope that for many this kind of EA-lite Pledge will be a gateway for people to encounter EA ideas and learn more about the philosophy, which is a gain that’s hard to quantify
Healthcare Workers only
This is not an attempt to make it “exclusive”, but this may be perceived this way by some.
So far, having a healthcare community focus has made it much easier to reach out to various medical associations and training programmes to spread the message.
Nestling the Pledge within a professional body/community has precedent with other giving Pledges (https://reg-charity.org/ https://www.highimpactathletes.org/ ) and we think this has value
We are quite a new organisation, primarily having outreach in the UK so far and hoping to expand over the next few years. We are making links in the US and Australia too. Our primary limitation is that we 3 co-founders are all working doctors ourselves doing this entirely in our spare time.
Really appreciate all of your input and we’d be delighted to hear from anyone by email info@give-health.org or alastair.yeoh@give-health.org if you’d like to be involved.
Thanks,
Dr Alastair Yeoh
Co-founder GiveHealth
A midpoint approach (working hypothesis) could be to offer a lower standard pledge for GiveHealth (1%-5%) to appeal to a wider audience, but also mentioning the GWWC 10% Pledge in a few places and provide a link to it, similar to what AAC has done.
Normalising the 10% pledge often involves showing that others are already doing it. Therefore, it is important to ensure that when people pledge 1%, they are aware that there is a community (GWWC) that they can join, which pledges a higher amount (10%). I am very excited about this project and the potential to encourage a large number of healthcare professionals to give effectively. However, I would like to note that in GWWC’s most recent impact evaluation, we found that a small but significant percentage of our Trial Pledgers have gone on to take the 10% Pledge. This likely represents the majority of the value we provide through the Trial Pledge. I believe this could also be true for people taking a GiveHealth pledge if you also were to promote a 10% pledge, although I am uncertain about this.
I also agree with Vaidehi Agarwalla’s suggestion to reach out to OFTW and learn from their experience with the 1% pledge, including churn rates and other factors.
Hey GiveHeath!
I’m really excited about this new effective giving organisation—I think that you’ve done a really great job of capturing the heathcare vibe with the website and promotional video (simialr to how HIA captured the sporty/althlete vibes on theirs). Feels a bit like an NHS explainer video (which I think is awesome!).
My name is Luke, and I work at GWWC as the Effective Giving Global Coordinator and Incubator where I support the global effective giving community and help with the development of new effective giving initiatives. Here are a few ways that I might be able to support your project. The most relevant of which is that I would love to jump on a call with someone from the GiveHealth team to chat about ways that GWWC and the wider effective giving ecosystem can support the work that you’re doing!
I’m also curious if you’ve been in contact with High Impact Medicine as I think they are interested in getting more involved in the effective giving space?
Hi Luke,
Thanks for this, I will get in touch directly to meet. We’ve have quite a lot of useful discussions and cross-pollination with Hi-Med. They do actually have effective giving as a core part of their recommendations/discussion but also focus on careers and other aspects of doing good.
Thank you, Luke, for suggesting this, and thank you again, Alastair, for the conversations we’ve had so far! We look forward to staying in touch and seeing how our organisations can support each other in our complementary goals.
Exciting! A few thoughts/questions:
I’m not sure quantitatively how much of a difference it makes having a giving pledge focusing just on healthcare professionals, rather than overall, but it’s possible that the focus/community aspect may make some difference. But the concept was interesting enough to get me (past medical device engineer, now health economics) to click on the post, then the website, so there’s that.
When did this actually start/how many people have taken the pledge? On the Pledge page there are 15 people listed ranging from October 2022 to December 2023. It’s possibly not all the people that have signed up, and/or the pledge might not have been open yet, but my first thought was that it looks like not many people have signed up/this isn’t that big. But if the launch is now (i.e. given the post) that makes more sense.
I see a comment below that 1% seems a bit low. Healthcare salaries do vary a lot between countries (e.g. a doctor in the US typically earns a lot more than a doctor in the UK, and also the rate that people are taxed will be different between countries as well). If healthcare workers in the countries you are targeting typically donate more than 1% I think that could take away a lot of the impact from the pledge (people don’t donate more, they might even feel justified to donate less). On the other hand I can see the argument that 10% is high/potentially offputting, so 5% might be a good middle ground. How did you choose which percentage to set as the pledge amount?
This is a really great initiative! Well done! I have several years of experience fundraising from healthcare workers, physicians mostly, across Canada and US. One challenge I’ve come across is that, in this environment (not sure about UK/Australia) they are so highly solicited to make donations to their hospital foundations, many of which have teams of fundraisers. Would be interested to hear of your experience with that and how to position the messaging alongside the frequent requests from their place of work (or if, perhaps, it’s not the case outside of N America)
I think asking people to donate when there are already so many solicitations is a big hurdle, not sure about the UK but in Australia there are some tax saving options which give half of the savings to you and half to the employer. Hospital foundations are less common i think.
RE the % question: I think the the sense that HCWs are already doing an altruistic task limits potential donations. Finding the balance between acknowledging this yet pointing out how privileged many HCWs in HICs are is a complex balance. Doctors, at least, are generally aware that they are in a privileged position through interactions with patients and other people at work. As you’re appealing to a scientific community, emphasising the cost-effectiveness studies of giving to highly effective charities compared to others would play an important role.
Personally I think starting at 1% and proving to people that that works could enable increases in this amount in the future. Ensuring there is follow up with current pledgers to encourage more donations, perhaps even flexibly depending on life factors or those pesky cost of living crises, seems like a good middle ground for people new to the concept, who are the target audience here as I understand it.
Here is an interview from the show rethink healthcare on YouTube. It talks healthcare volunteers in the Amazon jungle of Peru.
https://youtu.be/_kFKFh3WexY?feature=shared