You won’t see many SustainaHealth members clocking in or out of work, even at the office. At the same time as participating in SustainaHealth’s activities, they are also active as independent professionals in diverse other fields, including education, research, and business, and they divide their time between these roles as they see fit. There is no requirement for them to declare where their priorities lie in terms of their "main work" or "side job". For some, the most apt description may be "parallel work".

There are various reasons why we favor this work style.

One is the aspiration to provide a place for otherwise "hidden" human resources to be active. There are large numbers of people with a passion for public health and health care and possessing excellent abilities, yet who are unable to work full-time due to family circumstances, life events, or other pressing reasons. People like these are one clear reason to create a workplace that functions regardless of time and location. Indeed, among the diverse personnel currently gathered at SustainaHealth, we have those busy raising children, researchers based overseas, and professionals doing parallel work.

A second reason is to secure the "brains" of leading experts. For the interdisciplinary fields of public health and health care, broad expertise and deep insight are required in each of many specialist areas, while vast amounts of information are transmitted around the world on a daily basis in terms of academic papers and developing news stories. It goes without saying that no individual, no matter how talented they may be, can be entirely familiar and up to date with all the relevant issues.

Therefore, rather than a handful of full-time staff with expertise in each area, by gathering many frontline experts and facilitating their participation on a part-time basis, we can leverage a far greater amount of knowledge and insight, and thus provide greater value to clients and society as a whole.

On this same point, it is a common practice among think tanks and consulting firms to set up an office in a prime city center location and hire a large full-time staff. Of course, there are various benefits to this, but at the same time, simply maintaining such an operation incurs considerable fixed costs, and to generate revenue to pay staff and cover costs, there is little choice but to take on some poor choices of projects that may draw the organization away from its true goals and intentions. Naturally, the fees charged to clients also reflect the high costs involved.

With services such as strategic consulting, where problem-solving ability is the core value provided, or fields such as finance and human resources that dig deep into a specific specialty, and where clients are primarily large, high-earning corporations, this style of operation is feasible but costly.

SustainaHealth is not a commercial consulting firm, but we strive to operate as an organization capable of providing a high quality of service founded on deep insight and expertise and at low cost, and so we have developed the part-time model described here, and continue to evolve it day by day.