Mr. Heng Bunsieth has been Executive Director of the Cambodian Health Committee since July 2015, bringing his extensive experience in managing international and local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and delivering community based health care in Cambodia to CHC. He came to the CHC from his position as executive director of Action for Health Development (AHEAD), a local community-based NGO he co-founded in the western Cambodian city of Battambang in 2007, which works to improve the care of people with HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria in Cambodia.

Bunsieth received his medical education in the extremely challenging conditions of Site II, the largest refugee camp established on the Thai/Cambodian border in the 1980’s and early 1990s, which sheltered hundreds of thousands of civilians displaced by the genocide and civil war in Cambodia. A refugee himself, Bunsieth attended the medical school in the camp run by the American Refugee Committee (ARC), where he was a classmate of former CHC Executive Director Sok Thim. Bunsieth specialized in pediatrics in the ARC program and ran the pediatric ward and feeding center in the ARC Hospital at Site II, where he first met Dr. Anne Goldfeld, when she served as medical coordinator of the ARC program at Site II.

When the refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border were dissolved and the refugees repatriated to Cambodia, Bunsieth went to work with Dostal at Catholic Relief Services (CRS), in Battambang province in the west of the country where most of the refugees repatriated from 1993 to 2007. He was team leader and eventually replaced Dostal as the Battambang Health Program Manager when she moved up to become the regional advisor to CRS for Southeast Asia.  

At CRS, Bunsieth spearheaded the development of its community-based health care program, which focused on community health development and health system strengthening in collaboration with government authorities and local health workers. This approach resulted in a highly successful child survival project, and later in programs to deliver integrated care for HIV/AIDS and TB, including home care for people living with HIV and TB. In 2007, Bunsieth led the Cambodian health staff at CRS to found a new local NGO, Action for Health Development, where he was named Executive Director. At AHEAD, he guided nearly 300 staff and government health care workers to provide health education, disease surveillance, and universal access to treatment for HIV, TB and malaria in 7 operational districts of Battambang Province.  In addition, AHEAD provided care for TB and HIV in 7 prisons in 5 provinces. Under Bunsieth’s leadership, AHEAD received funding from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and several international NGOs, to support its critical work to strengthen the Cambodian health system to fight these treatable diseases.

Under Bunsieth’s leadership, CHC successfully obtained funding from USAID’s COMMIT grant for local NGOs for supporting the countrywide program for drug-resistant TB that CHC manages in partnership with the Cambodian National TB Program. He also significantly expanded the organization’s delivery of community-based TB care in Cambodia to 13 of Cambodia’s 25 provinces with support from the Global Fund for TB, Malaria, and AIDS and USAID.

Bunsieth’s deep knowledge about HIV and TB and health in general, and his deep commitment to bringing the human right of health to the poor has significantly enhanced and expanded CHC’s programs.